Sounds a lot like the No S diet.

www.nosdiet.com

Quickfold

Seems twenty percent of the time is too much but I guess it is haw healthy you were before.

dmtofree

@holymogwai:
I agree with everything after the first sentence. While reducing the amount of sugar in your diet is not a bad thing, the whole concept of eliminating nearly an entire food group (carbs), even for a short time, just doesn't seem like a good concept.

I've known many people who have done the low-carb/atkins thing and while they lose weight rapidly, they tend to gain it back just as rapidly. THe idea should be to look at your lifestyle and adjust your diet accordingly. Which, yes, might mean cutting back on carbs but not eliminating them entirely!

I don't know. I always say don't go on a diet, eat a diet. ie, balanced meals, small portions. And yes, exercise. That doesn't mean you have to run a marathon or go to the gym all the time. Just go for a walk. Take the stairs instead of the elevator, well, maybe not if you work in a downtown office building on the 63rd floor, but you get the idea. Oh, and stay away from soda (and sugar-overloaded Starbucks runs). There are plenty of other tasty drinks out there that aren't full of sugar.

Andy yes, the occasional splurge is fine, but what this blogger suggests (eat whatever the hell you want on the weekends) is not necessarily a good plan to lose weight. And as PotKettleBlack pointed out, she's closer to a 70/30 rule.

Okay, this is too long, but one last thing: I'm not a dietitian, so take any advice I give with the appropriate amount of salt.

conigs

Unsurprisingly, the Pollan Mantra applies here: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Deprong Mori

@holymogwai: But that's just so much... work.

hehe

I kind of do this naturally, eat healthy during the week, go to gym at least 3 times (this is a MUST. my life is so much better because of it), then I splurge on weekends.

The downside is I really feel bad on the weekends, and I'm not just talking hangovers. Now it's not only "I drank HOW much?" but also "I ate WHAT?" I've learned that if I strive to eat healthy on the weekends as well, I do so 50% of the time, but that allows me to be pretty guilt free.

dirtybacon

I hate to break it to the original blogger, but Sat/Sun is 2/7ths of the week, or nearly 29%. She is pursuing a 70/30 power law function.

She might be better off by keeping it on plan for 6 days and straying for Sunday or Saturday.

FWIW: We'd all be better off with what Holymogwai suggests. I know I am (save the small portions stuff).

PotKettleBlack

cut out your sugar,bread, and pasta for about a month. get off the computer and go outside. exercise. eat small portions.

thats all there is to it.

holymogwai

Haha, I don't know if the Monday to Friday thing, leaving the weekend to do 'whatever' is the best of ideas. I have a pretty active metabolism and I go to the gym three times a week, but I would love to see anyone sustain my weekend activities of drinking 10+ drinks Friday and Saturday followed by a hearty brunch and various snacks throughout.

I think the key is to just find items that seem like splurges but really aren't that bad for you. Instead of fried chicken just grill some chicken and find a really good BBQ sauce to put on it instead. You lose the fat calories that way and gain so much protein!

mmr

Both holymogwai and Eustace are 100% correct. I gave up startchy carbs (pasta, rice, potatoes, bread)and sugar, and have lost 36 pounds over 10 months and have never looked back. I sleep better, exercise more then ever, and have a much clearer head. Not to mention the fact that my BP and Blood Sugar levels are the best they have been in a decade.

And, best of all, I enjoy a very rich diet of meat and veggies and fruit and wine and cheese . . .

tim d

@conigs:

holymogwai didn't say anything about cutting out all carbs. she said get rid of the sugar, bread, and pasta. other deeeeeelicious carbs include old fashioned or steel cut oatmeal, bulgar wheat, quinoa, wild rice, sweet potatoes, legumes...

It boggles the mind!!!

EustaceTheDragon

@Ken: Exactly what I did. I've been super impressed with my results and shedding my beer gut so rapidly. I began to fear going to the beach this summer and well now my results are better than I bargained for.

I do need more sleep though.

JiveMasterT

I think diet is just one part of it. I've done a lot of research and...

What we need is a lifestyle change.

* Workout (Muscle Confusion)
* Eat Right 50-30-20
Carbs: 50% = 200 calories (ex. brown rice)
Protein: 30% = 120 calories (chicken)
Fat: 20% = 80 calories (olive oil to flavor your chicken)
* Sleep 8+ hrs a nigh
* Have lots of alkaline in your system (consider green juice, disgusting but amazing)
* Interval running (speed up your metabolism into a 24/7 fat burning machine)

In 3 weeks, I've seen more result than I did in the past year.

Ken

@Deprong Mori: We can count on you to remind us of that every time a post on food comes up =)

kureshii

I think 90% of people would lose weight if they just learned to cook for themselves and made totally reasonable tradeoffs in ingredients. Decadent homemade food is downright healthy compared to some pre-packaged food and certainly compared to fast foods.

IMO, do what it takes to make vegetables, legumes and whole grains taste good. A plate of veggies and brown rice with some bechamel and serrano ham is WAY better tasting than a big mac, and a whole lot healthier. Meat and dairy is only bad when it become the center of the meal, rather than the stuff you use to make healthy foods taste good. You gotta work pretty hard to overeat when you're consuming mostly whole grains...

It's awful hard to exercise your way thin. Running a 5k every morning only burns enough calories to take care of a couple cans of coke...

ppiddyp

I'll second what others are saying here. Cutting carbs completely is foolish and not nearly as healthy as some would lead you to believe. Everyone's body is unique, but your ratio of carbs to protein should be something like 4 to 1 or 5 to 1, IIRC. EustaceTheDragon makes an excellent point, too: there are high-carb foods that are actually very good for you because of what else they contain. For example, old fashioned oatmeal with a little flax seed, cinnamon, and a handful of raisins is far better for you than the microwavable instant stuff that's loaded with sugar and corn syrup and has been bleached and pulverized and otherwise destroyed. A note on quinoa though-buy it in bulk from a health food store if you can (much cheaper than the Bob's Red Mill at the grocers), and beware of how insanely high calorie it is.

Garbonsai

Comment on Apply the 80/20 Rule to Your Diet Hi, I am the writer of the article. You are right about the 30/70 - I didn't calculate it exactly, but just meant that in general, eating healthy MOST of the time, and eating whatever you like SOME of the time means its not a diet, but more a way of life.I have been doing this for 8 years, which means for me, this kind of rule makes it easy to stick to it for the long term. And, I DO eat whatever I like at the weekend. I figure, if you have eaten for optimum health from Monday to Friday - what's so bad about having a burger/steak or whatever you 'fancy' on the weekend? Of course, after eating healthy for the last eight years, even when I do come to eating whatever I like - its usually fresh produce and not fast food (it kind of infiltrates your mind set, even on the 'allowed' days) - so you can enjoy a good quality burger, as opposed to the fast food chain, etc. In any case, wish us all luck on the health train. Best wishes, Jodie

SandersCaepio

The Body for Life program suggests something similar. It considers your food intake for a week, and suggests you follow the suggested food choices / portions for six days, and work out for those six days. However, on the seventh day (Saturdays in my case) eat whatever you want, in whatever portion you want, and do whatever you want.

The benefits of this are twofold:
1. You get the foods you crave
2. You help prevent the "starvation" response that you might get, if you were used to substantionally overeating.

A lot of the more recent diet fads / books seem to have some aspect similar to this.

gunnarsvg

If your going to go this route, I'd try to not eat any junk after 3pm - give your body a chance to burn off that cheeseburger over the rest of the day, instead of eating it at night when it's more likely to be stored away as fat.

CK76

Not to be a jerk, but this is an incorrect usage of Pareto's Princinple, commonly known as the 80/20 rule.

Pareto's rule can state something such as 80% of the results come from 20% of the time spent. But the 80 and 20 do not relate to the same 'property' you are looking at, which is what this article is doing. It's stating that only 80% of what you eat matters... but matters for what? It has to be a different property.

80/20 is also known to distort to something such as 90/20 or 80/10. Notice that the 2 numbers don't need to add up to 100% because they're not of the same composition: it's often results aligned with effort, profit aligned with products, or customers aligned with your available time.

I don't think Pareto's rule applies to diets in this fashion because it's not like 80% of your results from a diet come from 20% of your results from what you eat. It's more like 80% of your results come from a solid 80% or more of how you eat.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Please read [en.wikipedia.org] . Note that the 80 and 20 are not of the same property in the examples given.

AKthe47

@Deprong Mori: Sorry, dude, I know you love that saying and all, but it's a bit more complicated than that.

Here's what's been working for me. Lost 30 pounds so far. YMMV.

HeartBurnKid

Great idea. Surely have seen variations of this work, and work like magic. If you have a metabolism worth a hoot. Got to at least have a normal metabolism.

There's such variety out there in how we humans are assembled that you've got to find what works for you.

But 80/20 is a good way to find out.

BlackFlag55

Once you cut fast food out of your diet, you don't crave it anymore. It just tastes greasy and salty and gross. So instead of having the "bad" stuff on the weekend, it makes more sense to completely cut out at least some of it. The cravings do go away after a few weeks.

vered

@kureshii / @HeartBurnKid: Hah, glad I'm not the only one who noticed... ;-D

rscotta

BTW, the advice in the linked article seems sound, and I'm sure if you eat healthy 80% of the time, you'll still generally be healthy (personally I take only 1 day off, but that's just me). I just wanted to point out that it's not an appropriate reference to Pareto's Rule (although the original article doesn't make the direct reference, but '80/20' is a pretty strong reference).

AKthe47

@vered: Agreed. Ever since I stopped on fast food and carbonated drinks a few years ago I never looked back, except for the occasional quick lunch or meal with friends.

kureshii

@vered: Yeah I tend to agree with you, though I do love me an In-n-Out Double-Double a couple times a year.

rscotta

@HeartBurnKid:

I don't cut out pasta or bread and I'm very fit. The most effective way to lose weight: eat less and exercise more (also known as "Diet for the Universal Human" or DUH).

Reducing intake of junk food, sodas, processed items, refined sugars are all helpful.

Pollan is in fact right.

And no, it doesn't have to be much more complicated.

Deprong Mori

I have to disagree. I've gone 45lbs in the last 12 months (230 to 185) and have dropped by body fat percentage from 28 to 15 or so. The one thing I noticed was that I did the best when I was going two weeks watching my calories. When I was good during the week and ate out on the weekend, I simply maintained. It always seemed to take until Wednesday of the next week to get back to my past Friday's weight. Even on those weekends, the only thing that changed was eating out two (some times three) times.

biggunks

This sounds like the Butterfield Diet:

+ Watch video

olivercmit

Pretty useful. I saw something similar in a bookshop, called "The diet with weekends off".

Toptiger5

@holymogwai: Cutting out carbs? I don't think so. I run 70 miles a week. I'm not getting through back-to-back 20-milers on just proteins.

rnkoneil

Nice advice.Unlike some health writers this one seems to understand the "moderation" concept.

Myles

@Deprong Mori: You're right, in a manner of speaking. The way to do things is, simply, eat less and exercise more. The niggling details that your ridiculous oversimplification fails to mention is how to eat less, how much less to eat, and how to start exercising. Which makes it less a diet plan, and more a slap in the face, since it assumes that it's so "Bob"-damn easy.

To point out just one way that your little pithy statement is wrong, rice and potatoes are both plants. However, if you eat "mostly" those, you're not going to get anywhere.

HeartBurnKid

@HeartBurnKid: Selecting the two starchiest choices out of the thousands available isn't a very reasonable way to proceed. Even if you did eat mainly those two items, if you had plain baked potatoes and brown rice you would probably be healthier than the average American. ;)

And actually it *is* that easy to exercise and eat less. It's avoiding the temptation of all those high-fat, high-sugar foods that can be hard sometimes. It has only been recently, historically speaking, that people had the luxury of not engaging in manual labor for much of the day; the luxury of eating highly processed high calorie foods at any time of day without lifting a finger to acquire them or prepare them (unless you were royalty, I suppose). I think we've seen what the consequences of that lifestyle are. I'm quite sure that in earlier centuries they managed to eat less and exercise more - without the benefit of any websites to guide them. =P

BrianW62

HeartBurnKid makes a very good point.

Nutrition and diet really isn't that simple. If it were that simple, we could all consider a degree in nutrition completely worthless.

HeartBurnKid's point rings this important truth: You may *think* eating simple may be healthy and complete (say, if I ate spinach and apples everyday, and not much of it). What happens is that you don't know the damage you're doing by missing all of your other vitamins right away, and you may not realize what health problems you will incur in the future.

A diet of spinach and apples in normal portion size, for instance, will leave you deprived of calories and many important nutrients and protein. You won't survive to be healthy by any means.

AKthe47

Actually, I've found that moderation in all things is healthy and a lot of it has to do with lifestyle. I used to work construction, 12 hrs/day hard labor, now I drive a desk most days. I don't need, nor do I eat, near the calories I did then, and I stay at a healthy weight. Obviously if you run 70 miles per week you need more fuel than I do, but that's just common sense. If I drive 100 miles/day I'll use a lot more fuel than someone who drives 100 miles per week.

It seems simple to me. Eat more calories than I burn = gain weight [like I did on our cruise]. Eat fewer = lose weight [like I've done since I got back...]

ibssguy