The Best of Plans, the Worst of Plans

http://thelowcarbdiabetic.blogspot.ca/2013/08/diet-and-dieting.html got me thinking about what I was up to when I started this blog.

I just had a fellow insist that obesity is only the result of only psychological or physiological problems, and insisted that philosophical issues are irrelevant. To me most psychological problems are the result of wrong philosophy, (our standard of conversion of stimulus into response) and the psychology is just fine. Oh well, everyone has the right to be wrong. My belief system does not require that anyone beleive as I do, but it prevents me from blindly believing non-rational stuff.    

There are a group of diets, I will call them "the arbitrary rule diets" that provide some simple rule that if one could and did follow, weight loss might occur. We all know that we need to eat less, but the doing that is the problem. We are driven by desires, motivated against our conscious plan by the subconscious; psychology, or body; physiological; what else is there? Philosophy.

There are only three things in diet we can change, quality, quantity, and frequency. Some of these arbitrary rules diets pick on one item only and is sufficient to fix the problem. Frequency. In my circle, 301 is a popular one, 3 moderate meals per day, nothing between meals, one day at a time. When you fall off, just get back on. I have seen many days strung together by some, and others last part of a day.

No white is another, quality type. That is no sugar, grains, pasta, potatoes, starches of any kind, bananas, etc. There is often an except cauliflower clause attached, and that can work. It removes the high calorie stuff. One again, it can work, as long as temptation, greed or envy does not get the better of one.

Then there is the balance type, card deck of meat, a serving of sturdy vegetables and all the greens you can handle, usually three times a day, with perhaps 2 fruits at selected time, but these are quantity type.

There are meal replacement plans, such as cabbage soup. The soup itself is not bad, and a pot provides a day lighter meals, a semi-fast type of thing, something like Dunken, but that was protein only some days.

There are displacement type diet, where the calorie rich portions are displaced with lower calorie, low caloric density foods. Dr. Barbara J. Rolls did a Caloric Density diet called Volumetric, based on displacement.

Then there is a concept that we overeat due to deficiencies, and there may be something to that, if we are deficient in something, and we may be from time to time. Julia Ross, the Diet Cure. But how do you tell, and to what? Without a big health food budget and a source of chemicals, what do we do? I was craving something so I ate a cantaloupe for lunch, and the craving went away. Does that show I was shortage in cantaloupe (inositol)?

But WTF is balanced? What is a Serving, and without commitment, this will fail if there is a psychological, philosophical, or psychological problem. So what does it all mean? or is the solution another arbitrary rule, Paleo-ish.