Which one wins?

We all know what yo-yo dieting is, right? You lose weight and then gain it back, plus some. You do this umpteen times and over the years or decades your weight goes up and down, up and down. Mark Twain is credited with saying, 'It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it dozens of times.' I know how he felt.

But whether you call it a diet, a lifestyle change or something else, how do we learn to not do what we've been doing and lose the extra weight so many of us are carrying around?

With all of our scientific expertise, why can't we win the battle of the bulge? Why is there so much conflicting information out there? Lo-fat, Lo-carb, Clean, Paleo, Bulletproof, Fat Fast, Vegan and Vegetarian, Dash, Atkins, Jenny Craig, Juice Fasting, the Soup diet and more, the list is endless. All of these diets have glowing testimonials to back them up, and many claim 'groundbreaking' scientific research to support their author's conclusions as well. There's even a book entitled, 'Diets Don't Work' that purports to tell us how to lose weight without dieting.

And what about the calorie debate? Do calories matter? And for that matter, what about fat, carbohydrates and protein? How much of each is to much? Should we be counting any of that stuff, or all of that stuff, and even if we want to, how do we find the time?

What if we apply a little common sense and practice a little history? Perhaps that will make things more manageable.

The conventional wisdom said that calories in had to equal calories out. If you take in more calories than you burn then you'll gain weight. So the dictum was to 'eat less and move more.' This is now being challenged.

Another dictum that I remember hearing from a physician trained in the 1940's expressed the wisdom of his age when he told overweight patients, 'Don't eat anything white.' Thus excluding bread, pasta, sugar, potatoes and rice; basically a low carb approach.

Another physician in the 1970's pointed out to me that vegetarians lived the longest, and so this must be the answer to my obesity problem. He recommended a diet devoid of animal products and high in carbohydrates.

This then basically summarizes the three overall approaches to weight loss most popular right now:

Low Fat/High Carb

Low Carb/High Fat

Balanced, with Calorie restriction

They all make conflicting claims, and they all promise breathtaking results. In the process of being fat for over fifty years and losing and gaining hundreds of pounds, I've come to a few conclusions that I'd like to share. Along the way I've read shelves of books and learned words like gluconeogenesis and glycogenolysis. I think I've tried every diet out there and have followed the pundits like E.T. following his trail of Reese's Pieces. Sound familiar?

Since they all say different things, they can't all be right, so how do you know what to do? Who do you believe? Who has the real science and not the junk science designed to just sell me something and leave me more fat and miserable than I was before? How can I tell?

Maybe I don't have to.

This is the idea that broke my brain.

What if they're all right?

No, I mean it, just hang with me for a little while.

The Paleo folks claim that ancient man ate a diet very heavy on fat and protein and low on carbohydrates. Some science backs this up and some doesn't. The High Carbohydrate crowd claims that humans are designed for a plant based diet. Again, some scientists say yes and some say no. The calories in/calories out crowd still has most of the medical community behind them, although many scientists in that group have broken ranks also.

What if the truth is, humans are an amazingly adaptable species that has survived and thrived well enough to reproduce itself on every continent on this planet except Antarctica?

What if we're designed to eat what we find in our environment? What if we can actually eat all kinds of stuff and still be thin and healthy?

So what changed? Was it fast food? Well yes, that has changed. Was it processed food - food like products designed by food scientists to be hyper-palatable, food designed specifically to excite the same pleasure centers in your brain as cocaine and heroin? Yes, that is certainly new. Was it the food landscape? What Kelly Brownell of Yale University calls our 'toxic food environment,' the fact that we're bombarded by psychological conditioning designed to make us crave these processed foods constantly? Yes, a case can indeed be made for such an effect in our modern culture.

But nobody's asking this question: What hasn't changed?

One thing that hasn't changed a whole lot in a great many years is the size of the human stomach. You can eat about as much at one time as someone generations ago when there were very few overweight or obese people in the population. So how did your grandparents and great-grandparents eat? How many times a day? What did they drink? How much? Did they worry about getting enough water? Did they count carbs? Count fat grams? Did they eat protein bars and load up on antioxidants? They never even heard of that stuff, so no, I guess they didn't do any of that.

So what did they do to remain thin and healthy for a lifetime?

They ate real food, they did it three times a day, and they did that pretty much every day, forever. The typical American eats on average, every two hours! Sure you're going to get fat if you eat just about anything all day long and drink liquid candy in the form of soda and sports drinks. I can remember as a kid standing in front of the refrigerator, staring at the contents and complaining that I was hungry. My mother would reply, 'Well, we're going to have dinner in an hour or two, so just have a glass of water.'

I can hear it now: Just have a glass of water and only eat at mealtime? What are you, some kind of a fanatic!? But that's the way we used to live, that's the way we all used to live. Would that still work? Is that really do-able in this modern 'toxic food environment'? I am resolved to find out. Beginning with the Nativity fast of my Church on November 15, I plan to live according to what I call The Food Rules:

1. Eat Real Food

2. Do it Three Times A Day

3. Rinse and Repeat

I'll keep you posted.