Many people have gained weight during the COVID-19 pandemic due to changes in lifestyle and eating habits. This article presents a practical approach to weight loss and overall well-being called the Common Sense Diet, designed to be understandable, manageable, and healthy without requiring tedious work. It incorporates useful aspects of various popular diets while avoiding their common pitfalls.
Background: A Journey Through Different Eating Strategies
Over the years, many eating strategies have been tried, including paleo, vegan, keto, lacto-ovo vegetarian, intermittent fasting, carnivore, OMAD (one meal a day), mindful eating, the Mediterranean Diet, and the standard American diet (SAD). Instead of finding the One True Solution, I have discovered that little aspects of each one of these approaches, when combined and seasoned with a modicum of rationality, produces the right dish: The Common Sense Diet. It’s common sense to put together each little nugget of wisdom in these sometimes radically different approaches to produce the best and most manageable and understandable diet.
Experiences with more radical diets often follow a similar pattern: initial excitement fueled by success stories and photographs, followed by a quick jump into the diet without proper planning, and ultimately, frustration and failure. However, these experiences have also led to the realization of the importance of sticking to real food and not eating very often.
During the pandemic, while maintaining a focus on real foods, the consumption of unreal foods has increased, and the frequency of eating has gone up. This is probably aided by the fact that I’m spending all day every day with two hungry teenagers and I’m seldom more than 20 feet from the kitchen. This situation resembles an accidental dirty bulk, where you eat in a caloric surplus to build muscle but choose less-than-ideal foods.
Motivation: Addressing Weight Gain and Inflammatory Symptoms
Before the pandemic, maintaining a weight of around 180 lb (at 5’11”) was effortless, following a looser version of the plan described below. However, during the seven weeks of lockdown, a gain of 14 lb has occurred, reaching 194 lb. At this weight, bloating, allergy symptoms, fatigue, and inflammatory markers like increased asthma, achy joints, and mild arthritis in the fingers start to appear. It is high time to address this before it gets out of hand! The plan outlined below is a refined version of what has been practiced for years (during non-pandemic times) to maintain a healthy weight, fitness, and strength level.
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The Common Sense Diet Plan
The Common Sense Diet consists of the following guidelines:
- Two meals a day, no snacks, no seconds, no platters or piling
- Delay the first meal of the day as long as possible
- Start or continue progressive strength training
- Do at least one session per day of jumping rope, running or biking
- Alcohol only twice a week or less frequently
- Try to stick with whole foods as close to their source as possible
- Once a week ignore all this and cut loose
Explanation and Details of the Plan
1. Two Meals a Day, No Snacks, No Seconds, No Platters or Piling
This guideline combines intermittent fasting, mindfulness, and portion control. Eating frequently often leads to overeating. Skipping one meal a day becomes easy with practice, and then skipping snacks, seconds, and huge helpings shortly follows. Jack LaLanne lived to be 96 despite bad genes. Frequent eating forces the body to focus on digestion and fat storage instead of fat burning, repair, and detoxification. One meal a day (OMAD) is tough, very tough. Two meals a day (TWOMAD?) is not tough once you get used to it. It feels right.
If you want to eat some junk or a dessert, go ahead. Just make sure it fits on the plate with the rest of your food. This is one of the best things about the Common Sense Diet. There will be junk. We are human and we can have junk from time to time. But as long as it fits onto the plate and thus into the plan (literally), it’s just fine.
2. Delay the First Meal of the Day as Long as Possible
This is the essence of intermittent fasting and translates to skipping breakfast. Some people skip dinner and have breakfast in the morning but I can’t imagine doing this. Jack LaLanne skipped lunch. Dinner is the main meal for me. But you can do it how you wish. The reason that skipping breakfast works is that once I eat, I tend to want to continue. The more frequently you eat, the more frequently you get hungry, but it’s not true hunger or a need for nutrition so much as a desire to eat. Putting this off as long as you can is a good way to stay out of that trap.
There are many different approaches to intermittent fasting that are very popular today. Some examples are 16:8, 5:2, alternate day fasting, OMAD, and the warrior diet. Generally speaking the numbers refer to hours or days. For example, with 16:8, you fast for 16 hours and eat during an 8 hour window. If you finish your last meal at 8:00 PM, for example, you don’t eat again until noon the next day. With 5:2, you eat “normally” five days a week and on the other two, keep your total calories very low, around 500. Some of the other examples have you paying attention to calories. What I don’t like about these approaches is that they inevitably lead to clock watching and counting. I’d prefer keeping the general idea and not concerning myself with the burdensome details. The two meal, one plate per meal guidelines will accomplish the same things without the need for counting and watching the clock.
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3. Start or Continue Progressive Strength Training
Strength training is a crucial part of the health and fitness journey. While free-styling workouts may be appealing, following a plan and tracking progress is essential. A Grind-Style Technique can be used, where you do three sets and gradually add reps to the latter two sets rather than the first one. Once you have all three sets equal in rep count, you add a rep to the first set and try again. This is progressive strength training, calisthenics-style.
4. Do at Least One Session per Day of Jumping Rope, Running, or Biking
These activities, or any other enjoyable fat-burning exercise, should be incorporated into the daily routine. While standard cardio like jogging or using the elliptical can be effective, High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) such as jumping rope, sprinting, or biking is considered one of the best fat-burning approaches, in addition to its efficiency and strength-building value. Although, its fat-burning value may be overstated.
5. Alcohol Only Twice a Week or Less Frequently
Limiting alcohol consumption is a sensible guideline for overall health and well-being.
6. Try to Stick with Whole Foods That Are as Close to Their Source as Possible
Apples are whole foods. Apple juice is not. Another way to think of this is the great-grandmother approach. Generally whole foods can be picked from the ground or from a tree and eaten. They may have to be dug up, or they ran around or scurried or swam around or flew around and should be cooked. That’s about the extent of the processing. During your great grandmother’s time, people had gardens and perhaps some livestock, maybe fruit trees. They went fishing and ate the catch. There’s a whole foods extravaganza right there, requiring little more than going outside and picking or catching what you want to eat, and maybe a little cooking. Maybe weapons. Certainly no bleaching, grinding, extracting, extruding, centrifuging, extrapolating, or colorizing. The more processing required and the more fractured the food item is, the less whole it is.
Whole foods have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff than processed foods, while having the same or fewer overall calories and producing more satiety and stable blood sugar. Furthermore, our genes expect and want whole foods. You must understand that processed foods are engineered in labs to serve one purpose: to compel the buyer to buy more. They are chemically engineered to appeal to the same parts of our brains that underlie drug addiction, which in my opinion makes them drugs. And there is only enough “real food” in processed foods to allow them to legally be called food, with the help of a team of lawyers and plenty of fine print. This is what we are eating, in large part because we can’t help ourselves.
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The best way to maintain a whole foods diet is to shop the perimeter of the grocery store, where you find produce, meats, dairy, eggs, and cheese. The closer you get to the interior, the more likely you will encounter processed food. Fortunately, as explained in the book A Grain of Salt: The Science and Pseudoscience of What We Eat by Dr. Joe Schwarcz, we can have our cake and eat it to. That is to say, a little junk is ok as long as the good stuff is there too. Just don’t replace real food with junk. According to Schwarcz, “roughly one in five premature deaths can be attributed to diet, with a low intake of healthy foods being a greater contributor than a high intake of unhealthy foods.” Pay close attention to this statement. It explains that the health problems are not so much from eating the bad stuff as from NOT eating the good stuff! We are starving ourselves to death as we get fat.
7. Once a Week Ignore All This and Cut Loose
To be sustainable, the Common Sense Diet needs to allow for breaks. This guideline encourages taking a breather once a week, without worrying about losing ground. You wouldn’t adopt an exercise program that you only do once a week and expect much progress. It might even be a reset. You can call it a “cheat” meal or a “cheat” day if you want, but I don’t really like the implications.