My self-experimentation inspired Bryan Caplan to do his own self-experiment: Could he lose weight by eating less without discomfort? He did two things:
1. Stopped eating when he wasn’t hungry. During a meal he began to pay close attention to how hungry he was. When he stopped being hungry, he stopped eating, even if it meant leaving food on his plate. Before this he rarely left food on his plate. Now it was common.
2. Cut down on his soda consumption. Previously he was drinking at least two cans/day of Coke or IBC Root Beer (both non-diet). He reduced this to one can/day, which he found was enough to keep his energy up.
Bryan is 5′ 10″. When this started he weighed about 178 pounds. Over 9 months, his weight went down to 155, where it has remained for 9 months. “Is this something I’m willing to do for the rest of my life?” he asks. “Yes.”
I’m sure that non-diet soft drinks — primo ditto food — are very fattening but it isn’t easy for me to believe that cutting back on them could cause so much weight loss. Did the don’t-eat-when-not-hungry rule also help Bryan lose weight? I don’t know of research that answers this question.
I can believe that he went from 178 to 155 over 9 months doing what he described, but I suspect few people have the discipline to pull it off.
I’d be curious what else he was eating; eliminating the ditto food probably helped a lot. One thing is clear to me: it is impossible to lose weight if you eat when you are not hungry; so it is necessary to be aware of your hunger levels when you eat and not go beyond them…
Well, from an overly simplistic mathematical standpoint, he lost 80,500 Calories worth of weight in say 270 days, or just under 298 a day. Dropping one can of coke (160 Calories) a day (maybe even more, since he says he was drinking “at least” 2 per day) puts us at 138.
Assuming that the meals he stopped eating when he wasn’t hungry previously were about 1500 Calories (not sure if this is reasonable, I really don’t have a good idea of how many Calories cooked food has), he could drop the remember of the weight by just eating 10% less, which seems very reasonable.
to add a wrinkle to jon’s calculation: That 80K is what he cut down from his REQUIREMENT, not consumption. If he was stable at 178 Lbs, they are the same. However,m if he was gaining weight when he met Seth, he had to cut down on the excess he was consuming, PLUS the 298 calories he had to cut down. Now assuming most people are gaining weight when they seek help, he needed to cut down on much more than the 10% you calculated.