Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

Almost three years ago my doctor gave me some unwelcome news. My blood pressure and cholesterol were dangerously high, and I was obese.

I always bristle a bit when a doctor tells me I'm obese for historical reasons. Decades ago I really was obese by any measure. Then I started lifting weights, and I lost a lot of weight that way. After I started putting some of it back on as muscle, I learned that the body mass index (BMI) doesn't distinguish between muscle and fat. So I'm usually obese (at least according to the BMI chart that doctors use) even when I've been in pretty great shape.

But I had to be honest with myself. I had definitely gained some extra weight over the years (that was not lean muscle mass), and I wasn't in anything close to the best shape of my life. Even so, if the weight had been the only issue I might have just blown it off. But the rising blood pressure and cholesterol were new, and much more alarming. My father had recently died and mortality was very much on my mind. And shortly after my doctor's visit, a friend wound up in the hospital with viral congestive heart failure (exacerbated by obesity) and nearly died.

So I resolved to try and take my cardiac health more seriously, and if I lost weight as part of the bargain that would be all to the good. I didn't want to focus on the weight as a primary measure, because, while I'd lost large amounts of weight several times before, the methods I'd previously used weren't good fits anymore. For example:

• Initially I'd lost about a hundred pounds by exercising and not really making many dietary changes, but as I aged that became a less effective strategy. Keeping up the exact same exercise volume and intensity didn't prevent weight gain year over year, and there are limits to how much you can scale up. If anything, as I've aged I've had to scale back because I've become more injury prone.
• Another strategy I'd used successfully was not buying convenience food or junk food from the grocery store. Because I didn't keep any in the house, If I wanted junk food, I'd have to go out and get it. That very slight "coefficient of friction" between desire and satisfaction was pretty good at stopping impulsive eating of not-so-good foods. But these days I live and share food with other people who want to keep junk food around, and, in the age of boundless internet-assisted food delivery, that strategy wouldn't be as effective as it was twenty years ago.
• I'd also tried traditional dieting (food weighing and counting calories) with temporary success, but that approach requires permanent commitment. The amount of time and effort that went into weighing and counting food was an enormous pain in the ass that I was unwilling to commit to on a permanent basis. Worse yet, constantly thinking about what I was eating and making constrained food choices while hungry was miserable. I found that ongoing hunger really warped my relationship with food and led to weird and disordered eating. So I'd quit, and once I stopped, I just drifted back up over time.

Simultaneously, I had another problem. I was eating pretty well, but I wasn't enjoying it. I was in a position where I could afford to eat out more regularly, and I knew how to cook rich, delicious food at home. And I did both frequently. But I found that nothing seemed very enjoyable. My initial reaction was to eat more of the foods I enjoyed the most, hitting all the highlights to try and rekindle my love of food. That was, surprisingly, counterproductive. I just ended up liking my favorite foods less, and spending entirely too much money chasing enjoyment.

Have no confusion on this point: I love food. I love to cook it, share it, and eat it. A large part of the joy I have in my life comes from food. So I viewed the gradual leaching out of meal-time pleasure with increasing alarm. I began to wonder if my depression was worsening or if I'd just reached a stage in adult life where nothing's really as much fun as it used to be.

Faced with these problems, I knew what features any solution would need to have:

1. To manage blood pressure and cholesterol, I needed to reduce salt and saturated fat intake while increasing fiber intake.
2. If I also wanted to lose weight I needed to reduce total calorie intake, but that was secondary.
3. The solution needed to be livable. To make permanent improvements it needed to be simple and cheap enough that I could do it for the rest of my life if I needed to.
4. The solution would also need to help me (somehow) enjoy food again.

I also could identify some features that the solution should definitely not have:

1. I didn't want to give up on lifting weights so I needed to avoid reducing my calories/protein so much that I stalled or injured myself.
2. I didn't want to have to spend much time thinking about what I was going to eat. To the extent I did have to think about food, I wanted the thinking to happen in advance (to avoid having to make decisions in real-time when hungry).
3. I also wanted to avoid being permanently hungry and lapsing into food obsession or disordered eating.

After chewing the problem over for a while, it occurred to me that salt and fat are both flavor enhancers, so my diet was likely to become at least somewhat blander on the way to health. It also seemed possible that eating just my favorite foods all the time was creating a hedonic treadmill effect. I wondered if it was as simple as eating less interesting food sometimes to create contrast. If I was right, and I had just dulled my enjoyment through overstimulation, it seemed entirely possible that a blander diet could solve both problems at once. I figured I'd give it a try.

The specific solution I settled on was eating the same bland, but filling, foods most of the time, and eating what I please the rest of the time. I started with just breakfast and then started tweaking recipes and adding in some lunches as well. After some iteration (and a few false starts), I landed on more or less the following formula:

• I eat the exact same bland thing for breakfast every day (a cup of rolled oats soaked in a cup of milk overnight, and a serving of fruit)
• I eat the exact same bland thing for lunch five days a week (I make beans and rice once a week and then divide it into five portions, the whole pot has 1 cup of dried mixed beans, 1 cup of dried brown rice, 1/4 cup of olive oil, a teaspoon of salt, a shake of garlic powder, and chili powder or salsa if I have it).
• I eat what I please for supper and the other two lunches.
• I sometimes eat a handful of nuts or a piece of fresh fruit for an afternoon snack, but I only have one snack. I also don't snack after dinner or before breakfast.
• On days that I lift I usually add a glass of milk or a protein shake with lunch.
• If I need to deviate (e.g. if I'm traveling somewhere and can't cook beans, or I'm someone's guest for breakfast), I don't worry about the occasional odd meal, in the interest of avoiding weird food issues. When I'm in those positions, I just eat what's around, and get back on my meal rotation as soon as I can.

I figured I'd do it for a few months and see how it went.

More than two years after I started the solution in earnest, I'm still doing it. Why? My blood pressure and cholesterol are back down in the healthy range, and I lost a lot of weight without drama. In fact, even though I'm still lifting three days a week and getting stronger, I'm at my lowest adult weight right now. I'm also merely "overweight" on the BMI chart rather than "obese" for the first time in a very long time. Physically, it's been very good for me.

On the mental/emotional side, because my breakfast and lunch are so bland, I find myself enjoying my supper a lot more. I've hopped off the hedonic treadmill, and I look forward to eating hamburgers or ice cream because I'm not eating them all the time.

More importantly, the method hasn't led me back into disordered eating habits or food obsession. I don't typically feel hungry and I don't find myself stress-eating or daydreaming about food. In fact, I think about food less than I used to because I don't even have the quotidian task of having to decide what to eat for most meals.

It would be hard to think of cheaper staple foods than dried beans, rice, oats, and milk. Depending on the prices I can find for ingredients, my breakfast and lunch combined typically cost me somewhere between 25 and 50 cents a day. This is an obvious monetary benefit, but it also provides a psychological benefit.

When I was younger I was living below the poverty line for a few years and experienced periods of food insecurity. Even as an adult there were some years where money was pretty tight and there wasn't as much to eat as I might like. The thought of being back there--wondering where supper was going to come from--is a fear that's stayed with me all my life. As a result, being able to get in two meals a day for ~50 cents feels satisfying to me in a number of ways.

In one sense, it's my own take on the Stoic rehearsal of poverty.¹ I ate a lot of oats and beans and rice when I was younger and poorer, and if I ever find myself in a bad spot again I wouldn't have to change my diet very much because what I'm eating is sustainable. It also reminds me of how I used to live: it's a good way for me to both avoid losing touch with the person I used to be, and to inoculate myself against fear of returning to that kind of life.

It's hard to overstate how easy to manage this diet is. There's no looking things up to find out the calories or macronutrients, no moral drama about food choices, no apps, no special food buying, no complicated prep, no having to make excuses to avoid eating out with friends, and no trying to order off the menu in restaurants. I just eat the same thing most of the time, and then eat "normally" the rest of the time.

Making my oats takes less time than it takes me to make a sandwich. Cooking the beans takes a few hours once a week, but with a slow cooker or instant pot there's only about ten minutes of actual labor, and then they just cook on autopilot.

There's also nothing magickal about the number of meals; I can scale it up or down to fit. For the first little while I tried eating bland breakfasts and only four bland lunches. And I was making progress, but it wasn't going as fast as I had hoped. So I added a fifth bland lunch and that accelerated the improvements in my blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight. Similarly, I've thought about going up to six or seven bland lunches to see if I can further reduce my weight, but that would make social lunches hard. I don't need to do that right now, but I could if I needed to.

While this bland diet has certainly created weight-loss, there may be more to the story than just imposing portion (and therefore calorie) control. The blandness of the diet itself may have metabolic benefits.

As I discussed recently in my review of The Hungry Brain, studies seem to suggest that eating a variety of hyper-palatable, highly processed food makes us gain weight not only because it is calorie-rich, but also because it may damage the brain-systems that help us regulate our weight and make us hungry (the so-called "lipostat"). The book also suggested that eating a smaller variety of blander food over time could help reverse that damage. That thesis was underscored by several studies where people who ate only a single type of bland, but nutritionally complete, food (such as an engineered liquid diet) lost significant amounts of weight without difficulty or subjective experience of hunger.

If the book is right that constant consumption of a variety of hyper-palatable food effectively damages part of the brain, then eating the same bland foods most of the time may actually be intrinsically good for me. I can't speak personally to whether or not the book is right about lipostatic damage, but I can certainly attest that eating bland food has resulted in weight loss for me without much subjective hunger.