I can actually speak to a variation of this theory, since I used Huel (a nutritionally complete powder) as my primary food source for, like, two years.
I can also speak to the “losing weight and keeping it off for 5+ years” thing, because in 2014 I hit my all-time weight high of 138 lbs (at 5′3″, this is the point at which the scale tips to overweight). I started calorie counting with a food scale and lost 15 lbs in a little over a year, which tracks with what the research claims will happen if you try to lose weight at a consistent small caloric deficit.
The end of this weight loss adventure coincided with the beginning of my Huel journey, and I continued weighing my food, weighing the ingredients that went into foods and dividing by the number of portions that I cut foods into, doing the guesswork that comes with eating meals that you cannot weigh, tracking all of the related numbers, and so on.
It worked, in the sense that I had the willpower to do it, and it wasn’t particularly time-consuming. But it didn’t work half so well as what happened next.
In the second half of 2020, I moved in with the great love of my life and he was all “what are you doing eating Huel when the world is full of delicious food?” He is a very capable home cook, and I quickly learned how to be a capable home cook, and between the two of us we ate meat and cheese and homemade bread and potatoes and vegetables cooked in butter and all of the things that people who are weighing their food and trying to get the maximum food volume for the fewest number of calories try to avoid.
It’s worth noting that we ate very little processed food. Obviously steel-cut oats are processed; Brie is processed; wine, if you want to think about it that way, is processed. But when we wanted cookies, we made our own. When we wanted naan, we made our own. When we wanted hamburgers, we made our own.
This could mean that we ate very little “highly palatable food,” although the food we eat seems to be extremely palatable.
The point of this story is that I assumed I would gain weight on this diet.
I lost ten pounds in a year, without tracking calories or increasing my exercise or anything like that.
This took me from “healthy weight for my height” to “slim end of healthy weight for my height,” and for what it’s worth being slimmer has demonstrated benefits. Aggressive, sustained piano practice is easier, for example, when you’re lighter. So is biking.
But that’ll take me off-topic, so let’s get to the actual thing of the thing:
WHAT DO I THINK HAPPENED HERE?
French Paradox. We were eating high-quality, home-cooked foods in small portions—and including a variety of foods at every meal. Three bites of a casserole next to three bites of baguette next to three bites of a salad next to three bites of dessert and so on. We spend roughly 30 minutes every night on food cooking and prep, so this kind of food is not overwhelmingly time-consuming. It does take planning ahead, in terms of grocery shopping and what not.
I was optimizing for equilibrium, not calories. After I got interested in the French Paradox thing I read French Women Don’t Get Fat, which still remains the most sensible thing I’ve ever read about “how to eat” (and I have read all of the Michael Pollan books). Basically, Mireille Guiliano says “eat so that you feel the same way all of the time.” Excessive hunger is just as distracting as bloated fullness. A meal that causes your body to change shape in a visual or palpable sense isn’t great; neither is trying to force your body into a particular shape by withholding food. Intoxication and abstemiousness are two incorrect solutions to the same problem.
Eating good food is the side dish to the main course of my life. I am very sure that I put on extra weight in 2014 because I was lonely, understimulated, and didn’t have anything else to do. If food is your primary source of dopamine, etc. etc. etc.
Anyway, what I am saying is
DON’T EAT BLAND MEALS FOR SCIENCE
IT WILL MAKE YOU SAD
WHICH WILL MAKE ME SAD
IT WILL ALSO CAUSE YOU TO AGONIZE OVER CALORIES, BINGE-RESTRICT, AND SUBJECT YOURSELF TO EXTRA MISERABILITY EVEN IF YOU MAKE IT WORK BY GETTING THE MATH RIGHT (oooh I ate 3600 cals yesterday so today I’ll only eat 1400, never mind how either of these eating experiences make me feel physically/mentally/emotionally).
~also read French Women Don’t Get Fat even if you are neither French nor a woman~
Eating good food is the side dish to the main course of my life. I am very sure that I put on extra weight in 2014 because I was lonely, understimulated, and didn’t have anything else to do. If food is your primary source of dopamine, etc. etc. etc.
The body-mind connection should not be underestimated. I started (very slowly) losing weight after I quit my last job. (No, it’s not because I would be too poor to eat.) The primary source of dopamine + the rest of your day sucks = almost impossible to resist temptations.
(Next time someone makes an UBI experiment, please also measure the impact on obesity.)
I feel like there’s too much interpersonal variation to make much of a single case like this. It might very well be that hyperpalatable food is a major factor for obesity in general, even if it didn’t affect you.
Oh, very true. The point of my narrative was to make an argument against “bland food being the solution,” while acknowledging that hyperpalatable food could still be part of the problem.
When I ate bland food nearly exclusively, I was focusing on metrics that allowed me first to lose and then to maintain weight, even though those metrics were high effort (not overwhelmingly high effort, but still), encouraged binge-restrict cycles (if I eat 3600 cals today and 1400 cals tomorrow, I’ll still be on target) and added anxiety to food-related cultural rituals that could not be measured and tracked.
When I focused on maintaining equilibrium during meals (mindful eating, as the kids say) instead of following preset rules, my body also lost and maintained weight without the associated stress.
If you hate the diet it’s not for the long term, just 3 months. And quitting’s fine. It’s also not meant to be necessarily bland, just not hyperpalatable ‘cafeteria’ food. It’s meant to be as close to an approximation of what a hunter gatherer tribe would be eating, except in this case you have much more variety with respect to what’s available to you in each category. Have you tried fried cinammon pineapple?
Yours is the dream situation and I agree best for happiness. But I think a tighter approach for research is justifiable to get a clearer understanding of if it works.
The French paradox is interesting, because it’s basically the above plus grains and dairy (and sugar). Higher saturated fat and lower PUFAs (which is another interesting theory). Do you add much/any sugar to your cooking?
Lunch: Rice, homemade mango slaw, homemade guacamole, smoked sausage (we didn’t make that, but it has no sugar, no HFCS, no nitrates/nitrites, no MSG), grapes, cheese
Dinner: Rice, homemade naan, homemade dal, vegetables cooked in butter and various Indian-influenced spices, red wine
Dessert: 100% dark chocolate square (Ghirardelli), segmented orange
the one thing I do avoid is HFCS, that stuff is not allowed in the house ;)
but I will make some kind of fancy-pants dessert once a month or so, I have an old-fashioned pound cake recipe that is just delightful, we are also good at making pie (crust from scratch)
The obvious question is “what were you eating in 2014 and how was it different,” and the answer is “I was still doing most of my own cooking because I wanted to save money, but I was terrible at it (one of the reasons I switched to Huel was because I didn’t have the skills to make food taste good) and most of my meals would have been embarrassing to serve to anybody else.”
Then, when I felt badly about not having anything good to eat in the house, I would order takeout or walk to the local Walgreens and buy candy and cookies. (Huel effectively stopped that habit, fwiw.)
Do we naturally eat more when there is something missing in our foodstuff, whether it’s flavor or nutrient or the experience of sharing a meal with people we care about?
I can actually speak to a variation of this theory, since I used Huel (a nutritionally complete powder) as my primary food source for, like, two years.
I can also speak to the “losing weight and keeping it off for 5+ years” thing, because in 2014 I hit my all-time weight high of 138 lbs (at 5′3″, this is the point at which the scale tips to overweight). I started calorie counting with a food scale and lost 15 lbs in a little over a year, which tracks with what the research claims will happen if you try to lose weight at a consistent small caloric deficit.
The end of this weight loss adventure coincided with the beginning of my Huel journey, and I continued weighing my food, weighing the ingredients that went into foods and dividing by the number of portions that I cut foods into, doing the guesswork that comes with eating meals that you cannot weigh, tracking all of the related numbers, and so on.
It worked, in the sense that I had the willpower to do it, and it wasn’t particularly time-consuming. But it didn’t work half so well as what happened next.
In the second half of 2020, I moved in with the great love of my life and he was all “what are you doing eating Huel when the world is full of delicious food?” He is a very capable home cook, and I quickly learned how to be a capable home cook, and between the two of us we ate meat and cheese and homemade bread and potatoes and vegetables cooked in butter and all of the things that people who are weighing their food and trying to get the maximum food volume for the fewest number of calories try to avoid.
It’s worth noting that we ate very little processed food. Obviously steel-cut oats are processed; Brie is processed; wine, if you want to think about it that way, is processed. But when we wanted cookies, we made our own. When we wanted naan, we made our own. When we wanted hamburgers, we made our own.
This could mean that we ate very little “highly palatable food,” although the food we eat seems to be extremely palatable.
The point of this story is that I assumed I would gain weight on this diet.
I lost ten pounds in a year, without tracking calories or increasing my exercise or anything like that.
This took me from “healthy weight for my height” to “slim end of healthy weight for my height,” and for what it’s worth being slimmer has demonstrated benefits. Aggressive, sustained piano practice is easier, for example, when you’re lighter. So is biking.
But that’ll take me off-topic, so let’s get to the actual thing of the thing:
WHAT DO I THINK HAPPENED HERE?
French Paradox. We were eating high-quality, home-cooked foods in small portions—and including a variety of foods at every meal. Three bites of a casserole next to three bites of baguette next to three bites of a salad next to three bites of dessert and so on. We spend roughly 30 minutes every night on food cooking and prep, so this kind of food is not overwhelmingly time-consuming. It does take planning ahead, in terms of grocery shopping and what not.
I was optimizing for equilibrium, not calories. After I got interested in the French Paradox thing I read French Women Don’t Get Fat, which still remains the most sensible thing I’ve ever read about “how to eat” (and I have read all of the Michael Pollan books). Basically, Mireille Guiliano says “eat so that you feel the same way all of the time.” Excessive hunger is just as distracting as bloated fullness. A meal that causes your body to change shape in a visual or palpable sense isn’t great; neither is trying to force your body into a particular shape by withholding food. Intoxication and abstemiousness are two incorrect solutions to the same problem.
Eating good food is the side dish to the main course of my life. I am very sure that I put on extra weight in 2014 because I was lonely, understimulated, and didn’t have anything else to do. If food is your primary source of dopamine, etc. etc. etc.
Anyway, what I am saying is
DON’T EAT BLAND MEALS FOR SCIENCE
IT WILL MAKE YOU SAD
WHICH WILL MAKE ME SAD
IT WILL ALSO CAUSE YOU TO AGONIZE OVER CALORIES, BINGE-RESTRICT, AND SUBJECT YOURSELF TO EXTRA MISERABILITY EVEN IF YOU MAKE IT WORK BY GETTING THE MATH RIGHT (oooh I ate 3600 cals yesterday so today I’ll only eat 1400, never mind how either of these eating experiences make me feel physically/mentally/emotionally).
~also read French Women Don’t Get Fat even if you are neither French nor a woman~
The body-mind connection should not be underestimated. I started (very slowly) losing weight after I quit my last job. (No, it’s not because I would be too poor to eat.) The primary source of dopamine + the rest of your day sucks = almost impossible to resist temptations.
(Next time someone makes an UBI experiment, please also measure the impact on obesity.)
I feel like there’s too much interpersonal variation to make much of a single case like this. It might very well be that hyperpalatable food is a major factor for obesity in general, even if it didn’t affect you.
Oh, very true. The point of my narrative was to make an argument against “bland food being the solution,” while acknowledging that hyperpalatable food could still be part of the problem.
When I ate bland food nearly exclusively, I was focusing on metrics that allowed me first to lose and then to maintain weight, even though those metrics were high effort (not overwhelmingly high effort, but still), encouraged binge-restrict cycles (if I eat 3600 cals today and 1400 cals tomorrow, I’ll still be on target) and added anxiety to food-related cultural rituals that could not be measured and tracked.
When I focused on maintaining equilibrium during meals (mindful eating, as the kids say) instead of following preset rules, my body also lost and maintained weight without the associated stress.
Plus I got to eat tasty foods.
If you hate the diet it’s not for the long term, just 3 months. And quitting’s fine. It’s also not meant to be necessarily bland, just not hyperpalatable ‘cafeteria’ food. It’s meant to be as close to an approximation of what a hunter gatherer tribe would be eating, except in this case you have much more variety with respect to what’s available to you in each category. Have you tried fried cinammon pineapple?
Yours is the dream situation and I agree best for happiness. But I think a tighter approach for research is justifiable to get a clearer understanding of if it works.
The French paradox is interesting, because it’s basically the above plus grains and dairy (and sugar). Higher saturated fat and lower PUFAs (which is another interesting theory). Do you add much/any sugar to your cooking?
I eat honey every day, probably a tablespoon’s worth on my morning oatmeal.
We don’t avoid sugar but we don’t go out of our way to add it. None of the food we ate today had sugar in it, for example.
Breakfast: steel-cut oats, fruit, nuts, honey, butter, egg, milk, coffee
Lunch: Rice, homemade mango slaw, homemade guacamole, smoked sausage (we didn’t make that, but it has no sugar, no HFCS, no nitrates/nitrites, no MSG), grapes, cheese
Dinner: Rice, homemade naan, homemade dal, vegetables cooked in butter and various Indian-influenced spices, red wine
Dessert: 100% dark chocolate square (Ghirardelli), segmented orange
the one thing I do avoid is HFCS, that stuff is not allowed in the house ;)
but I will make some kind of fancy-pants dessert once a month or so, I have an old-fashioned pound cake recipe that is just delightful, we are also good at making pie (crust from scratch)
The obvious question is “what were you eating in 2014 and how was it different,” and the answer is “I was still doing most of my own cooking because I wanted to save money, but I was terrible at it (one of the reasons I switched to Huel was because I didn’t have the skills to make food taste good) and most of my meals would have been embarrassing to serve to anybody else.”
Then, when I felt badly about not having anything good to eat in the house, I would order takeout or walk to the local Walgreens and buy candy and cookies. (Huel effectively stopped that habit, fwiw.)
Do we naturally eat more when there is something missing in our foodstuff, whether it’s flavor or nutrient or the experience of sharing a meal with people we care about?