Diet DietJust three rules and one exception:
Except (sometimes) on days that start with 'S'
That's it.
Too simple for you? Simple is why it works.
Is there really room for anything new under the sun as far as diet books are concerned? Hasn't every possible gimmick already been tried -- several times -- without making the slightest dent in the relentless advance of obesity?
There's one thing left: simplicity.
The No S Diet is a diet plan so short and simple that it fits on the cover of a book -- or a book proposal. It also fits on refrigerator magnets, mugs, pens, plates, bumper stickers -- see the "promotion" section, below. No pseudo science, no miracle foods, no counting calories or carbs or fat, no disgusting recipes or draconian meal plans, just plain old common sense, charmingly and mnemonically codified. In brevity: a mantra, a haiku, a spell. But down to earth as a kansas wheat field. It's the one approach people still have ears to hear after all the snake oil they've been sold. And it works.
Let me guess. You're thinking either "that's absurd! I mean it's cute and all, but it could never really work" or "maybe it works, but how do you turn a 14 word mantra into a book that we can sell?" I'll address each point separately.
Yes. It has. You can read what it did for me in "about the author," below, but more interesting is what the hundreds of people who've posted to the www.nosdiet.com bulletin board have done. I don't want to derail your concentration with a deluge of testimonials, but here is a small sample. See the web site for more -- there are more every day.
Brian from Ireland writes:
I started this sometime last summer or fall, can't remember exactly. I lost 40-50 lbs and seem to be holding steady around 185lbs for several months now, which is good for my height and i'm happy with it. I'm still doing no-s, it seems once I got to my ideal weight I stopped losing it. Sensible balanced eating. No way-out menu's. I love it! I've never felt so content about my weight or my appetite. Still have urges and break-outs from time to time, but they're not the gluttonous food orgies they used to be.
Deb from Long Island writes:
I eat what I enjoy, and I balance that with regular exercise... I would rather take longer to get slim, than feel like I'm in a biochemical war with my food.... I love it all.... It's almost my first year anniversary with NOS and I have lost about 17 lbs... Keep in mind I've been a bit lax about the rules in terms of my own issues (eg: night time snacking...) Not by choice, but just because I've had those habits since early childhood... They are really tough! So to get to my goal, it might take another two years... I don't care! I will never ever switch from this life plan... It is foolproof...
Rich from Toronto, who has since lost over 30 pounds, writes:
A month in, I don't think I'm on a diet anymore. I'm just eating normally, but it's a different normally than a month ago. There's nothing left to stick to; eating because I'm bored is unsatisfying now, going for seconds leaves me feeling uncomfortably full, and sweets that aren't *treats* are nowhere near as satisfying as they used to be.
No "Jared"s just yet, but pretty remarkable given that this is the result of a hobby web site run out of my basement in my spare time.
How could something this simple possibly work? Precisely because it's simple -- or rather, following the Einsteinian dictum, "as simple as possible, but not simpler." For all its folksy charm, there's a lot of serious, practical wisdom packed into those 14 words.
Commercial diets are too complicated for people with outside interests to follow ("eating = math"). Conventional wisdom rules about diet are too simplistic and vague to be useful ("only eat when you're hungry"). The No S Diet finds the happy medium between the two. It's simple and specific. You have just enough direction to do your job, but not so much that you resent its imposition. You have a solid framework, but the details are up to you. You have sufficient guidance and sufficient freedom. It's a system without too much system.
The No S diet solves the right problem. Pretty much any diet will lose you weight if you stick with it. The really difficult problem isn't how to lose the weight, but how to stick with the diet. According to the FDA, 95% of dieters fail to do this for more than a few months at a time. And is it any wonder? Popular diets are heavily optimized for rapid progress. They may be effective in an abstract, biochemical sense, but they don't take human psychology and motivation into account and are therefore extremely difficult and unpleasant to be on for any length of time. What do you do after you lose 9 pounds of bellyfat in 11 days? If maintenance gets any attention at all it's as an afterthought. But maintenance is more important than progress. Progress is intrinsically temporary; maintenance is what you'll be doing the rest of your life.
The No S Diet give maintenance its proper focus. It does this by treating wieght control as a mental problem, not a physical one. It focuses on incentives and enforcability, on leveraging limited reserves of willpower to build sustainable habits. The simple, natural behaviors it prescribes soon become automatic and permanent.
Even successful dieters from other systems will find the no s diet appealing. "What next?" isn't a hypothetical question for them, and chances are "more of the same" is not an appealing answer. The no s diet is a good place to start, but it's a great place to finish. It's the ultimate maintenance diet, the diet to end all diets.
The No S Diet is enjoyable. It isn't just an unpleasant grind towards a distant goal. Maybe you wouldn't do it solely for pleasure, but you can do it also for pleasure. And when the goal is distant and doubtful, or boring because already (temporarily) attained, that makes all the difference. Popular taboo/miracle food diets like low carb or low fat fail miserably in this regard. At the outset, it might seem worth it to trade pasta for unlimited steaks (or vice versa), but it gets old fast. Diets like weight watchers that require you to be a full time calorie (or carb, or fat) accountant are time consuming and joyless. With the nosdiet, no pleasure is denied, just delayed and contained. Served up on the platter of limited opportunity, pleasures become even more pleasurable than they were before.
I could go on and on... which brings me to my next point:
I'm not joking -- we can and should put the whole diet on the cover of the book. Brevity is the gimmick, so why be coy?
Be that as it may, we have to put something between the covers. What, then?
Questions and answers (and some provocative exclamations).
I don't suggest this out of laziness, merely because it's what I have already at nosdiet.com (printout attached for your convenience). I say this because:
The Q&A format doesn't mean chaos. The questions will be organized by topic (see sample table of contents below).
What kinds of questions could anyone possible have about 14 unambiguous words? You'd be amazed. See See www.nosdiet.com or the attached printout. I could easily mine the bulletin board for scores more.
That's right, anyone can now get (essentially) the complete contents of this book at the www.nosdiet com website, and this will continue to be the case after the book is published. We aren't coy about the rules, we shouldn't be be coy about the Q&A. In fact, we'll trumpet it's free availability. It's the right thing to do, and it will sell more books.
People are sick of being conned. Really sick. They've been conned not once but many times, in a big way. And each new con artist acts like the last one invented the problem. We wash our hands of the whole business. There's no con because there's no required money -- either for the system itself or (far more significantly) for a whole big lineup of necessary and expensive follow up products. We give away the razor and there are no blades. In the context of the current public mood about diet, this is irresistable.
We will never beg, or pretend that people need to buy this book or anything else to succeed with no s. Over and over, we will emphasise how easy and simple and free this is. The inside jacket will read, "Yes, it's really that simple. You could put this book down, walk away, and lose weight by following the simple rules on the cover." It's true, it challenges the reader to keep reading, and it will sell more books. Readers won't buy out of mere gratitude, they'll buy out of relief: finally, they're no longer suckers, they've been shown some respect -- that's worth a few bucks.
People will feel good about buying this book. They'll get excited about it. They'll talk to their friends about it. And they'll talk about it as being free, which it is. What sells better than the word "free?"
I'm not being machiavellian here. I don't have to be. It's genuinely win-win.
There are basically two kinds of commercial diets: taboo foods diets (low fat, low carb) and substance accounting diets (weight watchers, points, etc). The situation is complicated a little by hybrids (counting taboo food units) and fluff. Horrified scientists occassionally publish sober descriptions of what the ideal human lab rat should eat, but these fail so miserably as prescriptions that they're not even worth considering.
Common sense is slowly creeping into the picture, but only in a very masked way and unaccompanied by simplicity. The Leptin diet, as desconstructed on the no s diet bulletin board, seems to boil down to almost the same thing as the No S Diet, but it's heavily obscured by pseudoscience and fluff. It also lacks the necessary safety valve and motivation of S days. It's encouraging to see confirmation some of the basic no-s principles, and that they sell despite a totally incompetant presentation.
The 3 hour diet is the diet of the moment as I write this, and it has a lot of advantages over the above mentioned taboo substance or accounting diets. Indeed, it resembles the no s diet in some ways. The blurb on the cover of the book, for example, "it's all about timing" could also be applied to the No S Diet (and was, in fact, on the nosdiet.com home page, until I saw they'd taken it). But in other more important ways it is profoundly dissimilar. One can poke holes at the 3 hour diet from a bunch of directions, but the key issue that cuts to its core is this: there's too much timing. It's like living on orange alert all day long for the rest of your life ("oh crap, is it time to eat? Better set the alarm clock!"). Its reliance on overclocking your metabolism by precisely timed mini meals is the antithesis of the no s diet. The no s diet works with your natural clock, not against it. Much better to do what thousands of generations of skinny people have done than the precise opposite. As with other diets, 3 hour might work biochemically, but it's doomed psychologically.
I had been worried that the no s diet wouldn't translate, but then I came accross the following:
(hebrew article screenshot pending)(translates the rules into hebrew and then states "this sounds better in English")
and this:
(japanese)
and this:
(norwegian)
People are so desperate for common sense it seems that they'll do without the pun. These aren't anomolies. Look at the member list on the bulletin board; they come from Austria, England, Germany, Israel, Romainia, Canada, France, Australia, Denmark, "Planet Texas" and more.
We don't have to go overseas to find evidence of a broad appeal. To use the inevitable pop-demographic du jour, the emphasis on personal responsiblity appeals to "red staters," the ironic tone to "blue staters." Putting them together like I've done isn't some virtuoso trick, some awkward chimera of marketing. It's precisely what gives the system its draw and power: wit and wisdom, back together again, at long last. It's deeply natural and obvious. If there's anything surprising about it, it's why it hasn't been done before.
I is neither a doctor, a nurse, a dietician, a nutritionist, a personal trainer, nor any other kind of health professional. I AM NOT AN EXPERT. This is a tremendous advantage.
Diet is not a problem that requires specialized expertise. It is a general problem with an obvious solution. If I were encumbered by any form of expertise, this obviousnessness wouldn't be nearly as striking. A doctor cannot convincingly say "DUH."
I am a librarian by training and a computer programmer by accident. I noticed I was getting a little too heavy (borderline obese, actually, if you want to get technical) and came up with this common sense willpower trick. I lost 20 pounds in two months and kept them off without spending too much time suffering or even thinking about it. People I've explained it to have responded enthusiastically and so I thought I'd stick it on the web. The response has been overwhelming.
I've since lost an additional 20 pounds (so total progress has been 210 to 170), but to be fair, that may have something to do with the fact that I started doing some exercise (also a routine of my own devising -- we'll talk about this in a separate proposal, believe me, you'll want to). This seems to be my natural, healthy weight. People now describe me as "lean," which is sweet music to a lifelong "husky."
I've been on the diet since March 2002, with no yo-yoing. Unlike most diets, that get more and more insufferable as the gimmick ages, no-s gets progressively easier and becomes largely unconscious. At this point I'm about as tempted to break the rules as a devout Hindu is to eat a cow, or a Muslim a pig. It's a great feeling.
Obligatory before and after photos enclosed.
Of irrelevent qualitifcations I have plenty. I got a bachelors in English literature from the University of Wisconsin, a masters in library science from Queens College New York, and am currently lead software engineer on the Argo Genomic Visualization project at the Broad Institute at MIT. This qualifies me to yawn at genetic excuses for being overweight.
This is one book that can (and asks to be!) be judged by it's cover -- by it's spine, even (if we can get it thick enough to have a spine). Just get it in stores and it will shout out from the shelves.
Imagine how well a book with this cover would sell on the checkout line of the supermarket, right next to all those impulse buy candy bars. Probably too well! I imagine the supermarkets woundn't even give us checkout line shelfspace because of the negative impact it would have on sales of neighboring products. A product that sells too well, now that's a problem worth having!
We won't need a slick marketing campaign. Slick is the opposite of what we're going for. variety of promotional products. I currently sell no s diet T shirts, refrigerator magnets, mugs and pins on cafepress.com. What makes these no s diet promotional products particularly irresistable is that the entire system fits on them. You can see the designs for these on the enclosed web site printout.
The website is structured as a flat list of questions, the book should be hierarchical: questions organized by topic.
I'm a software engineer, I'm not going to give you a mere demo when I have a working product. So instead of the customary sample chapter, here is a printout of the www.nosdiet.com website. It has the virtue of having been looked at by thousands of pairs of eyes, and it gives a better cross section than a single chapter would. It'll sell you on the system better than anything else I could show you.
(printout will be enclosed)