Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's not hard to lose weight if you are just trying to lose pounds: you just stop eating as much and don't do any weight training. Your body will burn away your lean muscle mass and you'll lose water weight depending on how you cut. The thing is though that without the muscle your metabolism goes down and you just gain it back...
There are some home scales that do electrical impedance testing but they are inaccurate too.
I think that the BMI calculation that is done at home is bad for people trying to get in shape. They worry too much about the BMI and not about the important stuff such as building muscle which will help you keep the fat off in the long run.
Most people don't just need to "lose weight," they need to improve their overall fitness. If you're overweight, then increasing your fitness will include losing weight, but it's not everything. And the best measure of your physical fitness are simple physical exercises.
I've gone through several cycles where I have gained and then lost weight. Right now I am in another weight-loss cycle as a result of a overly sedentary lifestyle; this is the hardest "comeback" that I have ever staged.
When People ask me what my goals are I always tell them that I want to loose 30lbs. I don't elaborate any further unless they show a real interest in what I'm doing.
In all actuality, my real goal is to loose an "aparent 30lbs." Essentially, when I have reached my initial fitness goals I want to physically appear as if I were 30lbs lighter. Since my regimen is a combination of diet, aerobic exercise, and weight training the actual metrics at the end of my goal will most likely result in me having lost some weight, but also having gained some weight as muscle mass; this is, in my opinion the healthiest way to approach weight loss.
Having said that, normal metrics such as BMI, and weight are not good indicators of improvement. Its actually better, at least for me, to use much simpler criteria. In my case I look at easily measurable things: Am I getting stronger? Is my cardiovascular training getting longer and/or harder? Am I sleeping better at night? How are my sustained energy levels throughout the day? Am I staying fully hydrated? Am I handling stress better? Is my overall attitude positive? And finally, do I see visual improvement by taking a self-photo every 2 weeks?
Really I only check things like weight and body fat % at the end of a particular fitness goal and even then I don't give it much credence.
In fact, wait circumference is pretty important, especially for me. Central Obesity (i.e. the stomach, love handles, etc) is correlated with a lot of health problems - much stronger correlation that just being overweight in general.
Other than that, the pinch test works well too.
The idea of using people's innate biases to help them is compelling, I especially enjoyed that the 'anti-charities' of causes you dislike had the highest success rate.
I noticed the article cited cases where the people worked together or had some other social contact.
I wonder if the real motivator is not so much money as peer pressure or "social proof" (as Robert B. Cialdini might say).
There's a great website about procrastination, http://www.procrastinus.com/, that uses this understanding of future discounting to help one get things done. The idea is that a long project should be broken up into smaller tasks so that, even though meeting the smaller goals results in less absolute reward, they are more compelling because the completion horizon is so close.
Basically, humans are wired so that a jelly donut (or a few hundred bucks) now is perceived as more beneficial than 5 to 10 years of existence tacked on at the end of life. For a very long time, that has been a very sensible proposition.
In any case... great innovation: applying old principles (competition & financial incentives) in new ways to new realms. Like with smoking cessations, sometimes you have to just try several different strategies until you find one that works for your mind/body system.
I am reminded of the maxim, "Insanity may be defined as continuing to employ repeatedly the same strategies and expecting to get different results.
The good news is that the foods are actually very delicious. One just needs to be open enough to investigate what is actually allowed and not be biased by a "vegan" misconception. There are many unhealthy vegetarian and vegan diets. The diets recommended by the above doctors are a healthy plant-based diet, as opposed to many of the junk food veggie diets.