Why don't more people eat this way?

[wade4veg]

My problem was fighting with my weight my entire life. Over 40 years I had been on about a dozen different diets, many of them many different times. I never became obese but I was always fighting and the whole process made me miserable.

I got here gradually, first giving up meat and dairy and then after a couple years, oil sugar and salt. When I learned I could pretty much eat whatever I wanted if I avoided meat, dairy, processed food, oil and sugar it seemed obvious that was the way to go. But, I was utterly sick of dieting and fussing about the whole issue (I had hit bottom). The sacrifices seemed the obvious choice and far easier than constantly dieting..

A huge part of the reason why more people don't eat this way is the unwillingness of those who attempt and those who promote this way of eating to elevate "gradualism" and "imperfection" to their properly deserved position.

If only the promoters and those who follow were willing to make changes over several years, then compliance and continuation rate would be much higher.
Imagine going from a diet with 38% of calories as fat, down to a diet of 10% of calories as fat...but over 5 years.
38....31.....24.....17.....13.....10 percent.
You'd hardly know the changes or miss the prior foods, but in only 5 years you'd be eating perfectly.
Most people could do it in 2 or 3 years....BUT NO,,,, almost like on the Biggest Loser... the predominate theme is to do it FAST.
Drop everything at once... stop eating all meat,... stop using any oil... and do it within 30 or 60 days.

Then wonder and wonder why only 1 or 2 percent of the population follows the advice.
People are not like that, or at least a huge percentage of them are not.
Simple changes are easy. Stop drinking any soda and other sugar sweetened drinks. Stop drinking milk... and use soy instead.
That alone would be huge, simple and non-threatening. Try that alone for 6 months.
Meanwhile start eating more veggies, while not deliberately reducing meat.. See how it goes for 6 months.
Your meat consumption will probably drop naturally as you fill your plate with more veggies and salad.

So on and so forth....with a eye 5 years down the road.. Allow weight to very gradually drop.
A pound or two a month is fantastic.... building confidence as you go from month to month.

A fair portion of the public could do that, while only a fraction can do it all in a few months without falling away soon after.

[barryoilbegone]

I've seen a number of threads on this forum, and this feels like one of the most important of them all so far.

If we look at the Star McDougallers, what we DON'T see (yet) is someone who has done this from childhood: resisted temptation, and had great parental teaching on this. Dr McD, time to get working on that! They have to be one or two out there somewhere, no? That would be a different type of Star, but I feel I could learn from someone who has gone through a childhood (or is going through one!) and is addressing the challenges that this type of living brings socially.

But we can vote for health, compassion, science and gradual change each day by doing this. I guess I choose WOE overall because in Sarah Hamilton's words from the Terminator series: "in an insane world, it was the sanest choice".

[Spiral]

My problem was fighting with my weight my entire life. Over 40 years I had been on about a dozen different diets, many of them many different times. I never became obese but I was always fighting and the whole process made me miserable.

I got here gradually, first giving up meat and dairy and then after a couple years, oil sugar and salt. When I learned I could pretty much eat whatever I wanted if I avoided meat, dairy, processed food, oil and sugar it seemed obvious that was the way to go. But, I was utterly sick of dieting and fussing about the whole issue (I had hit bottom). The sacrifices seemed the obvious choice and far easier than constantly dieting..

A huge part of the reason why more people don't eat this way is the unwillingness of those who attempt and those who promote this way of eating to elevate "gradualism" and "imperfection" to their properly deserved position.

If only the promoters and those who follow were willing to make changes over several years, then compliance and continuation rate would be much higher.
Imagine going from a diet with 38% of calories as fat, down to a diet of 10% of calories as fat...but over 5 years.
38....31.....24.....17.....13.....10 percent.
You'd hardly know the changes or miss the prior foods, but in only 5 years you'd be eating perfectly.
Most people could do it in 2 or 3 years....BUT NO,,,, almost like on the Biggest Loser... the predominate theme is to do it FAST.
Drop everything at once... stop eating all meat,... stop using any oil... and do it within 30 or 60 days.

This is why I think there is this unwillingness to elevate gradualism and imperfection to their properly deserved position.

Those who believe that the McDougall diet is the healthiest way to eat and who want to educate others only have a limited amount of words they can communicate before they lose the attention of their audience. So, there is a reluctance to complicate the message by adding in all kinds of transitional phases to this way of eating.

Also, asking people to go from a 38 percent fat to a 31 percent fat diet would be more complicated and require that people measure carefully the foods they eat and continually punch the quantities eating into a nutritional calculator.

I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time knowing whether I was consuming a diet that was 24 percent fat or 31 percent fat, 17 percent fat or 38 percent fat. How much ground beef would I be allowed to put in my spaghetti sauce? How much oil could I use to cook up my vegetables?

I suppose someone like Mary McDougall could create a new batch of recipes. Some would have 38 percent fat; some 31 percent fat; some 24 percent fat.

That would be a pretty big diet book, right? How effective would this approach be? Would people really follow through on this? Would they studiously count the tablespoons of oil they use while cooking (or consume while eating at a restaurant), making sure they are hitting that 24 percent fat percentage target? And then a year later, would they switch over to Mary McDougall's 17 percent fat percentage recipes?

I am guessing that there is good reason why the approach you are suggesting has not be attempted very often, if at all.

It's like a 5 legged dog. In theory, it sounds great. Maybe that extra leg helps the dog run faster. But in nature, dogs usually have 4 legs.

[rick.p]

In my experience, most people are just set in their ways and not interested in change. They are accustomed to eating certain kinds of foods. They consider their way of eating normal. They see "health food nuts" as oddballs. And they have no interest in being on oddball themselves.

[wade4veg]

Those who believe that the McDougall diet is the healthiest way to eat and who want to educate others only have a limited amount of words they can communicate before they lose the attention of their audience. So, there is a reluctance to complicate the message by adding in all kinds of transitional phases to this way of eating.

Also, asking people to go from a 38 percent fat to a 31 percent fat diet would be more complicated and require that people measure carefully the foods they eat and continually punch the quantities eating into a nutritional calculator.

I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time knowing whether I was consuming a diet that was 24 percent fat or 31 percent fat, 17 percent fat or 38 percent fat. How much ground beef would I be allowed to put in my spaghetti sauce? How much oil could I use to cook up my vegetables?

I suppose someone like Mary McDougall could create a new batch of recipes. Some would have 38 percent fat; some 31 percent fat; some 24 percent fat.
.

NO...no....you entirely miss my main point. The figures of 38%...31%...24%... are never meant to be a precise goal.
They are only figures that one might pass along the way of gradualism as they improve their diet.
NO, your thinking is exactly the problem. I give a framework... a gradual goal, and you find the need to instantly turn it into some kind of rule... wherein every day's diet would be precisely planned to achieving 31% or 24%...
That is just more of the insanity that drives people to failure.

You have a very long term goal with a eye on health and proper body weight. You are willing to adapt and adjust along the way. You leave the charts, the precise recipes, and the strict rules alone and instead just keep on moving in the healthy direction. No angst, no deprivation, no disappointment that you aren't losing fast enough, or your cholesterol hasn't dropped overnight.

It is the entire avoidance of following precise eating to hit some percentage figure (which I only included as a example that on might pass through on their journey)
This way of eating is not sinning vs sainthood... or it shouldn't be such.

[roundcoconut]

I tend to agree with wade4veg about making gradual changes and having imperfect transitions!

People who take up jogging are never advised to go on a five mile run each day of their first week. No one ever ridicules beginner runners for interspersing walking with their running until they are able to jog comfortably for five full minutes. In fact, aren't beginners specifically encouraged to ramp up their mileage very slowly from one week to the next? I think you'd just call that "building a foundation".

If we give people permission to change their eating in ways that did not feel so overwhelming, we would do them a great service!

If you challenge yourself to eat two pieces of fruit each day, and to have a whole intact starch at the center of each meal, could that become your new normal? Three months from now, you may feel so at ease, and have so much positive feedback from the changes you already HAVE been able to make, that the small amounts of meat <GASP!> still on your plate, may lose their slot entirely.

The really good place to be with your food patterns, is when you wake up every morning and just eat the way you eat. Your food choices aren't consuming more than a fraction of your energy.

I would love to see people who are even two weeks into this way of eating, find a way of eating that is a grade or two up from how you HAVE been eating. So if you've been eating with at a third-grade eating level, then see if you can bump up to a fourth-grade eating level.

People who change things all at once can certainly make that work, and I personally DID change my eating all at once. But the relapse rate suggests to me that some people are overwhelmed by so much change at once, and it does not run like clockwork, even after several weeks or months.

I too wish we had more respect for people who implement moderate changes, then settle into those changes (then lather rinse repeat, as someone here likes to say!)

[roundcoconut]

As to the original question "Why don't more people eat this way?", I think that one important piece of the puzzle is that they don't have role models.

Do you notice how Americans, on the whole, do not travel out of the country? We think that America is the only place you can ever be, the only place you can ever live. Many of us do not personally know someone who has moved to a foreign country, so it doesn't seem to be in the realm of possibility.

But then, if you travel outside of America, you meet a TON of people who have expatriated to somewhere else. You see that all these people -- some of whom are not even particularly bright or daring -- have managed this, and you realize that you could do the same.

Like, if I walked the streets of Bangkok for three days, I could easily find 20 people who are living long-term in Thailand. I could ask, "What kind of visa do you have?", "How did you manage to buy property in Thailand?", "Whose address do you use to file taxes each year?", and any number of questions.

What once seemed totally beyond the range of possibility, becomes VERY possible when you have role models!

[colonyofcells]

I used to not think much about what I ate and was always busy with other things. I would buy the on sale foot long at subway without ever thinking about what weird ingredients are found in the seemingly whole grain bread. When hotdogs were on sale, I would eat many hotdogs for 1 meal. I ate some of the junk food sold at costco. I would eat veggie patty and tofu but sometimes would eat more animal products. I thought fried fish was health food. I only started eating healthy after I got the usual chronic disease. Swimming in a culture of unhealthy food, it is hard to be conscious about the unhealthy food. I was eating healthier in the Philippines and Singapore where I often would order rice with 2-3 vegetable dishes. In america, I sometimes would eat in Panda Express ordering fried rice with tofu dish and steamed vegetable dish. I now visit farmer's markets on the weekends and it is sort of like a new religion so I can understand why it can be hard to convert the masses to healthy eating.

[Spiral]

You have a very long term goal with a eye on health and proper body weight. You are willing to adapt and adjust along the way. You leave the charts, the precise recipes, and the strict rules alone and instead just keep on moving in the healthy direction. No angst, no deprivation, no disappointment that you aren't losing fast enough, or your cholesterol hasn't dropped overnight.

It is the entire avoidance of following precise eating to hit some percentage figure (which I only included as a example that on might pass through on their journey)
This way of eating is not sinning vs sainthood... or it shouldn't be such.

If Dr. McDougall had written "The Starch Solution" in the way you have described, it would have been a confusing mess. It would not have been clear as to whether grilled chicken is a health food or an unhealthy food. Instead, grilled chicken would have been described as "a food you can eat as you transition yourself towards trout and catfish, but after you have given up fried chicken."

The book would have ended up 1,000 pages long. By the time someone finished reading it, they would be thinking that rice and lentils were optional foods, foods that you could eat sometime in the 23rd century or just before an asteroid destroys all life on Earth, at which point, ah, what the hell, what not eat some greasy pizza, since we're all doomed anyway.

Obviously, someone can read The China Study or The Starch Solution, grasp the message that whole plant foods are where health is to be found. Still one could move towards this diet on a gradual basis. One could eat oatmeal with mixed berries on Monday morning and still eat eggs and bacon on Tuesday morning. But if Dr. McDougall were to recommend eggs and bacon on Tuesday mornings, rather than simply leave it up to the individual reader, the result is confusion.

Also, if someone were to eat oatmeal on Monday and eggs/bacon on Tuesday and then after a few weeks found that they only lost a single pound of weight or that their blood pressure hasn't improved or that their blood sugars didn't improve or that their joint pain didn't feel any better, they are likely to say that the McDougall diet failed.

Someone like Jeff Novick or Dr. Esselstyn or Dr. McDougall can't afford to create a complicated, contradictory and confusing message, leaving people wondering what the core message was really about in the first place.

When I read The China Study, when I read The Starch Solution, when I read Dr. Esselstyn's "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease," I did not finish those books confused as to whether eating chicken or fish or olive oil was healthy. It was clear. The decision as to whether I would occasionally eat at a restaurant and order a meal that contained one or more of those "off plan" items was entirely up to me. Those doctors gave me the framework. If I wanted to modify the framework to my own preferences or to my own personal situation, I could. But they provided to me the education that I needed.

If you fuzz up the message, sure, you will find a few people who will gradually wean themselves into a healthy diet over the next 50 years. But those people will be outnumbered by the people who give up the diet completely after 6 months because they saw no real improvement in their health and they continued to tease and tempt themselves with those greasy, salty foods they have always enjoyed.

This reminds me of the response that the recently deposed dictator of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, gave when he was asked about democracy in Egypt. We in Egypt have been moving towards democracy over the past 400 years.

[kirkj]

Just to be clear, I didn't really know about McDougall when I stopped eating meat and dairy. I did feel I wanted to STOP DIETING and at first thought going vegan would be enough. And it was for the first 25 pounds. I wanted to stop dieting but gave myself a year to lose 25 pounds and that is about how long it took, too.

After losing the initial weight, I discovered this website and eliminated oil. After years of dieting, I had an intuitive understanding of calorie density and wasn't eating much oil anyway. I later wanted to get my BMI under 22 and lost another 15 pounds. To do that I had to be quite compliant.

I remember looking over a McDougall book in the 90s and thought it was too extreme since Ornish let you eat non-fat dairy. Ornish was one of the diets I tried a few times.

The point I'm trying to make is I didn't plan to gradually move to a McDougall compliant diet. I first became vegan and then discovered the China Study, this website etc and liked all the things I read.

Not sure this clarified anything!

[wade4veg]

If you fuzz up the message, sure, you will find a few people who will gradually wean themselves into a healthy diet over the next 50 years. But those people will be outnumbered by the people who give up the diet completely after 6 months because they saw no real improvement in their health and they continued to tease and tempt themselves with those greasy, salty foods they have always enjoyed.
)

Well, the results you get now are perhaps 1% to 3%.....
So while you may feel that way, the results don't provide support for essentially eliminating the more gradual movement to better eating.

And you have one part entirely wrong. No one is saying that you flip flop... eating oatmeal on Monday and bacon eggs sausage and hash browns on Tuesday.
Rather you gradually adjust each day.... and each day will gradually become better and better, with odd days only occasionally.

I'm afraid your mindset on this is quite dualistic. You seem unable to combine the long term goal with a step by step approach. Thus the huge number of dropouts, as with any set diet.

How many people currently eat 10% fat... no meat, no oil, etc. 1%? 2% max?
Look at the Oregon Ms study... what did that well instructed group achieve after a year? Certainly not 10%
But were they to stick with it over several years, i think they would become comfortable and gradually drop to near or at 10%.

[roundcoconut]

If Dr. McDougall had written "The Starch Solution" in the way you have described, it would have been a confusing mess.

I tend to be of the opinion that if you give people the information they need, they can often take it from there. If a person feels they can eat 80% of their meals according to the guidelines of a starch-based diet, then why shouldn't they? Especially if it will improve their health in real and meaningful ways.

Also, if someone were to eat oatmeal on Monday and eggs/bacon on Tuesday and then after a few weeks found that they only lost a single pound of weight or that their blood pressure hasn't improved or that their blood sugars didn't improve or that their joint pain didn't feel any better, they are likely to say that the McDougall diet failed.

That's the thing though. I feel like people's expectations are often in proportion to their perceived suffering. Someone who has exerted mass amounts of energy to make it through a wedding without eating a single bite of food from the buffet, or to drink their morning coffee without a TBSP of the soy-based creamer they are used to drinking, is naturally going to say, "This has consumed so much of my emotional energy, that the payoff better be big and fast". Of course, the payoff is NOT big or fast. So, it seems like people would be wise to abstain from heroic levels of perfection that will mostly serve to piss them off and make them feel like perfection carries too high a cost.

Someone who has implemented some of the most painless changes for them (the dietary equivalent of low hanging fruit) wouldn't be likely to expect miracles. Someone who has adopted some painless changes would probably be delighted to see the scale move a pound every two weeks, but someone who is going balls to the wall is gonna be TICKED at that kind of result.

Someone like Jeff Novick or Dr. Esselstyn or Dr. McDougall can't afford to create a complicated, contradictory and confusing message, leaving people wondering what the core message was really about in the first place.

There are a lot of indulgences that don't seem to derail people, and a lot of non-sloppy exceptions people can make. For example, I used to have a rule that it was perfectly OK to drink a cup or two of sweetened coffee at the hair salon. My hairdresser was a vegan, and would always have some type of sweetened flavored creamers in the fridge and I would sip some coffee as my color was processing. (Drinking my calories? horrors!)

But when indulgences are well partitioned like that, there is no danger. I'm not going to start getting my hair cut more than every six weeks, so it's just not going to get out of hand. Also, I''m not going to ask my hairdresser for a third cup or a fourth cup, because once the haircut is over, we're done.

So people who have similar partitioned patterns of non-compliance aren't going to be suddenly under the impression that coffee with fat and sugar is healthy. They just know that 80% compliance is accepted and encouraged as a path toward better health.

I'm actually horrified when people are made to feel that anything short of perfection, equals failure. That is the mentality that has some people stressed about their eating. You hear the note of desperation in their posts: "I know tofu is an allowed food but not a recommended food, but please cut me some slack -- I'm new to this and I'm doing the best I can." [That is almost a direct quote from a recent post.] The pressure they feel is almost palpable!

[baardmk]

someone on the internet is wrong...

Fair warning/notice; I haven't bothered reading most of what was written in this thread for obvious reasons. (important topic, but I think I've read these discussions/arguments before)

But I saw this claim that the deficit of promoting gradualism in our camp has been a big part of the failing of this movement. This diagnosis is just plain preposteorus and on multiple accounts. But that's not even for me to prove. The claimant has the burden of evidence. To my perception the argument is a red-herring, not focusing on the greater forces of society, medicine, politics etc.

But just to make the counter argument in a few bullet-points

• Our movement is a fringe amongst a fringe.
• Would mainstream be listening with a small tweak in message ... preposterous
• In communicating with public this camp's leaders are clear on what's bad or good - and doesn't discourage any positive steps. However in dealing with patients there's a different context to think of because adherence and results may drop precipitously with a muddled and too soft/ambiguous message
• if the claim is only that adherence long-term is hurt. Well, prove it. We're not in the scientology cult here, and people are allowed to be wherever they are on a spectrum if they want to. But of course none of us should advocate such "moderations" (in bad things) as good. Even if long-term adherence is very poor, that's what you would expect anyway with a very non-standard WOE.

[petero]

Thanks, Spiral, you just saved me from eating 2 Clif Bars. (I bought a 6 pack of the Crunchy Peanut Butter because they were on sale.) Your post brought me back to thinking about my goals and I ate rice cakes instead. Now my day's % calories from fat is 4.8% instead of the 7.2% it could have been!

I don't think people are primarily rational, and as you can see I'm not immune from my own criticism. I was jumping through all sorts of hoops, trying to justify a substandard choice when a healthier choice was literally right next to it. Why did I even think it was a good idea to buy Snackwells for exercisers, just because they were on sale?

I haven't read all the responses but I do agree with pundit999 that if the environment was different, it would be easier to make the choice. It's much easier to self-delude in an environment where there is a perception of conflict among alternatives--check out global warming or cigarette manufacturers as "merchants of doubt."

Habits can be trained (by definition I suppose), but I'm extremely skeptical of any suggestion that some people are inherently more disciplined than others. The other post about misbehaving kids comes to mind here. I was that nerd, but the choices I was making were much easier because of the (irrational) influence of the family and school environment I was in, not to mention personality quirks, which are also not inherently individual. And of course other aspects of the environment, like access to support and probabilities of future success.

Imagine how much easier it would be if it was the norm--if McDougallers were those nerds. If there was no appearance of scientific conflict, if your doctor preached it, the government recommended it, plenty of the people around you were doing it, they thought it was easy, and they were succeeding like we see on this board, and the manly thing was to refuse to grill animals or destroy the environment.

Btw, the donut eater is beyond the pale and can't be saved, LOL. I'm more interested in the high-fat dieters, "fat adapted athletes" (et tu, Noakes?) or nutty vegans.

edit: Also agree with baardmk above. Ambiguity is also a set up for bad choices.

[colonyofcells]

It is hard to fight the addiction to refined substances and the addiction to traditional junk foods like animal products, oil, white rice, refined noodles, etc. Even the mcdougall diet has tried to make a compromise on white rice, refined noodles, etc. bec it is difficult to fight traditions.