Counting calories.

I've posted here before about weight loss, but not for quite a while. That's because I decided to quit trying to lose weight. I've been dieting, off and on, for nearly 50 years. At first I counted calories, then carbs, fat grams, and Weight Watchers points.

For a short while, I was on NutriSystem: prepackaged foods, a bunch of supplements, and no bananas. Seriously, no bananas. It had something to do with the way their diet handled potassium intake. I lost weight on it -- but anybody would. It was an 800-calorie-a-day, high-protein diet. They achieved the protein numbers by putting protein powder in everything -- even the prepackaged hot chocolate mix.

I've managed to stay away from gimmicky diet aids -- Ayds "candies" (remember those?), Slim-Fast shakes, fasts and cleanses, fen-phen. Haven't done any of them, ever. In most cases, I'm glad. I've also glad that I've never fallen for the siren song of bariatric surgery; nearly everyone I know who's had it done has gained the weight back, and some have had medical complications, to boot.

I've met with nutritionists several times over the years. I even signed up for a clinical trial for some weight loss drug, but I quit when the nutritionist gave me information that conflicted with information that another nutritionist had given me years before.

In short, over the years, I've lost hundreds of pounds...and gained them all back.

So I related to the New York Times story that came out this past week. It turns out that Weight Watchers has an image problem. People are tired of thinking about their weight. They're tired of thinking about food all the time. Instead, people today want to be healthy. They want to be strong. They want to eat clean (whatever that means).

Weight Watchers solved their problem by reinventing their program yet again (they tweak it every couple of years, anyway) and hiring Oprah to be their spokeswoman. Sign-ups skyrocketed. I highly doubt whether their results are any better, though, and here's why:

Diets don't work.

We have known this for years. One big reason is this one, from a Psychology Today article published in 2010:

Obesity and overweight can be conditions that are caused by early life trauma... In one early study of 286 obese people, half had been sexually abused as children. In these cases, "...overeating and obesity weren't the central problems, but attempted solutions." For these people, therapy might be a prerequisite to healthy weight loss.

Programs like Weight Watchers address physical hunger. They focus on the scale -- on measurable results to show investors and prospective clients -- and they basically tell you that if your problem is emotional eating, you just need to change your attitude, gosh darn it, and here are some tips for that.

Of course, there's a lot of recidivism in diet programs. As the author of the New York Times article says, if you want to be successful at Weight Watchers, you basically have to resign yourself to being a member -- counting points every day -- for the rest of your life.

No wonder I got discouraged and quit.

Unfortunately, that means the pounds have come back. So I'm trying something slightly different this time. It's an app called Noom Coach. You can download the app for free, but to get full use of the features, you have to pay for the coaching and group meetings. So far, I've been using it for a little less than a week. I haven't learned anything that I didn't know already, and the group chat feels a lot like a daily Weight Watchers meeting (for good or ill). But it's easy to log my food and the app does the calorie counting for me.

That's right! I've come full circle. I'm back to counting calories.

I'll let you know how it goes.

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These moments of calorie-free blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Curmudgeon Corner: Weight loss for fun and profit. Mostly profit.

-PaulH- via Flickr

Oh, leave me alone, already. Two posts about losing weight in two months hardly constitutes turning this into a dieting blog.

Yes, I'm once again doing the Lifestyle Change Minuet. This makes my 974th attempt, give or take, to get my weight into the "normal" range. I went on my first diet in junior high; I lost 27 lbs. and still wasn't within the normal weight range for my height. (Yes, I still remember the number of pounds I lost on that first diet.) In the decades since, I have tried a number of weight loss programs -- everything from Nutri-System (where they provide you with pre-measured food packets, all of it laced with protein powder, and tell you not to eat any bananas) to Geneen Roth's suggestions (my favorite, which actually is excellent advice: "Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car") to counting fat grams under a dietician's care to Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers has been the most successful program for me, in terms of the aggregate number of pounds lost -- I'm up to 100+ lbs. for all the various times I've signed up over the past ten or twelve years, including the 14.6 lbs. I've lost so far this go-round -- so I'm doing it again.

All told over the course of my life, I have lost probably hundreds of pounds -- and I have never, ever reached my goal weight. I don't expect to get there this time, either.

Because here is the thing about weight loss programs: If they worked and kept working, then America wouldn't have a problem with obesity. Everybody would be thin. And then the people in the diet industry would all be out of work. So it's in their best interest to design their programs so that their customers have a little bit of success, and maybe even a lot of success. But the deck is stacked against us for a number of reasons (portion creep among them). So we will always be back.

The Weight Watchers program is one of the best of a bad lot. When you pay your money (and it ain't cheap -- the 17-week Weight Watchers At Work program I'm in cost me $186), they give you a two-digit number. This is the number of points' worth of food you are allowed to eat each day. (Your points-per-day drop as you lose weight; as a friend said jokingly, they punish you for being successful.) You also get access to a website (although depending on your iteration of the program, you may have to pay a monthly fee for the site access) that includes a database of hundreds of thousands of food items. The site includes a place where you can list every bit of food that has gone into your mouth, and it will tell you how many points you've eaten and how many you have left for the day.  You can even type in your personal recipes and the online calculator will tell you how many points there are in each serving. And they have a smartphone app with a barcode reader that's tied to the food database. (This beats the old days, when they handed you a sort of cardboard slide rule and a booklet at your first meeting, and you had to keep track of your food on paper.) They give you some weekly fudge-factor points, and you get extra points if you exercise. But that's the program in a nutshell.

But that's not all there is to Weight Watchers. They also produce cookbooks with point values listed for each recipe, cooking tools designed to help measure portion sizes, and a FitBit-type activity monitor. They also sell food under their brand -- lunch-sized entrees, snack foods in two-point single-serving packets, "ice cream" treats, and so on.

It's the Weight Watchers-branded foods that make me crazy. They are not healthy. The lunch entrees are loaded with salt and chemicals to make up for the lack of fat, the two-point snack foods are jam-packed with artificial sweeteners and other chemical additives, and the "ice cream" ingredients list is mostly unpronounceable.

Sure, the foods appeal to Americans whose palates are used to the chemically-processed sugar/salt/fat American diet. People at my meeting buy boxes of them. But shouldn't Weight Watchers be setting the bar higher? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to sell really healthy foods under their brand? How about Weight Watchers-branded produce? Or fruits sporting "0 points!" Weight Watchers stickers? Because even though they tell you that you can eat anything you want (as long as you count the points), it doesn't take long before you realize that it's really pretty easy to beat the Tyranny of the Points System: you just have to quit eating full-fat dairy and anything fried; cut way back on your consumption of grains, sweets, and alcohol; and load up your plate with fruits and veggies, most of which have zero points.

But, see, if they sold really healthy foods, they wouldn't make as much money. And if people broke their dependence on processed foods, then they wouldn't fall off the wagon as easily, gain back all the weight they lost, and need to join up again.

And yes, even knowing all that, I joined up again.

Stay tuned. I'm sure I'll have more to complain about as the weeks go by.

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A few bits of business: As promised, the Crosswind e-book edition is now 99 cents; Undertow is on schedule for release March 20th; and I'm busy planning the Facebook virtual beach party in celebration of the launch. Y'all come!

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These moments of curmudgeonly blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.