THE TORTOISE DIET™ – LOSE FAT SLOW AND KEEP IT OFF

The Tortoise and the Hare: Originally, The Hare and the Tortoise – Aesop’s famous fable – remember that story?

The tortoise and the hare (a rabbit) got into a race in which the hare being much faster, would certainly win. The hare, much faster, was way ahead of the tortoise, so the smart alec rabbit took a nap waiting for the tortoise to catch up.

The hare wanted to humiliate the tortoise and cross the finish line with the tortoise just behind as the hare blazed past him. But the lazy rabbit slept soundly as the tortoise slowly crept past him and won the race.

The cliche “slowly but surely wins the race” came from this fable.

But this Post is About Diets:

So let me tie these two things together.

First, the tortoise won the race because he was slow but relentless. He plodded along at his usual pace, determined to win the race. The hare was obviously faster, but he lost the race because of inconsistency and a lack of determination.

With weight loss diets, you can lose weight fast, with ups and downs, stops and starts. Or you can lose weight slowly and surely without erratic results.

Most commercial weight loss programs promise rapid weight loss and promise to help you keep it off. The reality is that rapid weight loss is disruptive, and your body wants it to stop. Your body was happy the way things were and wants the lost weight back, maybe even a little extra, just to be safe.

These fast weight-loss diets are notoriously ineffective and cause unwanted side effects. The Tortoise Diet™ has none of these issues. It’s simple to do, with no calorie counting or constant weigh-ins and absolutely no adverse side effects.

Don’t tell anyone you’re on a diet because the Tortoise’s effects will be slow and unnoticeable. It’s like a stealthy diet. You won’t have to tell your friends you failed because they won’t notice anything anyway and will not have any expectations.

The Tortoise Diet™ is an elimination diet, not a calorie reduction diet.

This diet works on two principles:

1. The weight set point theory.
2. The food value tradeoff theory.

Let’s consider Set Points first:

Your body likes to keep things in equilibrium.

Although you might not be, your body is comfortable with your current weight. If you go on a crash diet and lose a lot of weight, your body will be way out of equilibrium and far outside of its comfort zone.

It will rebel and raise hell until you put the weight back on. It was doing just fine until you and your crash diet stepped in – figuratively, it’s mad at you.

This is because of weight set points. I talk extensively about these in this post.

Set Point Management is the cornerstone of the Tortoise Diet™

Set Point Management means that you stay within your body’s weight set points and lose weight slowly so your body can adjust its weight set points downward without torturing you with hunger and other annoyances.

Generally, this means losing two to three pounds per month. Like the Tortoise, you will eventually make it to the goal line. Slow, steady, and persistent.

Yes, It might take you a year or two to make your goal, but that’s probably how long it took to gain the weight anyway. Losing weight faster than this violates your body’s set points. You have to be stealthy and sneak around these roadblocks.

See, the Tortoise Diet™ is a new paradigm in weight management. It is not focused on losing weight. It is, instead, focused on not gaining it back. In the Tortoise Diet™, every pound lost forever is a victorious event. The “forever” part is more important than the “lost” part.

This is the new thinking, and set point management is what makes it different.

Food Value Tradeoffs.

This is the second principle of the Tortoise Diet™. As I said earlier, the Tortoise Diet™ is an elimination strategy diet. It’s not about calorie reduction by eating like a prison camp inmate, fasting every other day, or eating monotonous meals like nothing but fat-laden proteins.

All of these (and others) are out there, and you can do them if you want. In the short term, they work, but long term they don’t.

So let’s start with simple elimination as a first strategy.

Eliminating foods:

Note: Here, I’m not talking about eliminating whole classes of foods, but choosing one at a time for elimination. I will use the following bad habit as an example:

Many people are addicted to soft drinks like cola. One can of regular cola has 140 calories. Nutritionally, it has nothing but sugar – something you don’t want, and something that has no nutritional value.

Your body can use sugar for energy, but this is a poor choice – there are many better ones. If not burned for energy, your body turns sugar into fat, and does this quite easily. So cola is an easy choice for elimination.

So Start Eliminatin’

You don’t have to climb Mount Everest here, just stop drinking cola. Simple, just one thing to do, and it’s not hard. Just do it cold turkey, or switch to a 0-calorie version. Yeah, you might get the jitters, and miss your colas and caffeine, but this is really a small price and a bargain to boot.

Here’s why: Say you drink three colas a day. OK, that’s 3X140 = 420 calories a day, gone like magic. But it gets better. 365X420 = 153,300 calories. Now, a pound of fat has 3,600 calories. So 153,300 / 3,600 = 43 pounds of fat.

So if you don’t fill the void with something just as bad, you lose 43 pounds of fat with a single step. You quit colas and nailed your victory down. This is a tremendous return for your efforts, and you did only one thing.

Nail it down, or it’s gonna get loose and come back.

So here’s the formula: eliminate something bad and then “nail it down.”

There are many things you can quit consuming – that dish of ice cream before bed would do just as well as the cola example. Eliminate it and nail it down. See, the beauty of this is that it’s a little here, and a little there. Like putting a complex puzzle together a piece at a time, pretty soon, a picture starts to emerge.

So, keep eliminating and nailing down what you eat but don’t need. Quit them one at a time, and nail ’em down so they don’t get loose and come back.

Once you’ve whipped a bad habit, you’ve won a mental fight – you’re a champ. It was tough, and you don’t want to do it all over again. You’ve knocked it down, and now you must nail it down so it never returns. There are mental and physical tricks to do this.

However you keep a bad habit nailed down, keep it there and don’t let it up. As time passes, the strength of the habit will subside, and you will think, “How could I have done that to myself?”

At this point, you’ve won.

Swapping foods:

OK, you can’t eliminate everything you eat, but you can make better choices. Once again, this is a thing-at-a-time strategy. You don’t overhaul your entire eating routine in a single day. You simply make smart choices when and where they’re available.

Here’s an example:

White bread is a high-glycemic food, the equivalent of colas and white rice. And yes, Aunt Martha’s yeast rolls are high glycemic and oh-so-delicious. Don’t say no to Aunt Martha, say just a couple or substitute some of her famous cornbread.

Eat a sweet potato instead of a white potato. Try an apple instead of a banana. Eat an orange instead of drinking orange juice (which is usually sugared). Enjoy avocados as a fruit (which it is, and very filling as well). Tomatoes are fruits too and loaded with nutrition.

Nobody ever got fat eating too much broccoli and spinach. Eat up as much as you want. These foods are very filling because of their fiber content.

The point is to change your eating choices a little at a time. Constantly evaluate what you eat and make substitutions where possible. Don’t forget nuts, which are very filling and highly nutritious. Eat them with other foods like oatmeal to add extra taste or as a snack instead of that goodnight dish of ice cream.

Almost everything you eat has a substitute that is either lower on the glycemic scale or higher in nutrition. Either way, you win as a smart trader.

Be a Tortoise and outsmart the fat:

With the Tortoise Diet™, you’re not likely to be hungry all the time. For example, the three colas a day aren’t food that satisfies your hunger. They are simply a habit that makes you fat. You will not be hungry if you don’t drink them or if you substitute them with a zero-sugar cola.

Food substitutions are the same. Swapping a sweet potato for a white potato will not leave you hungry. Neither will swapping cornbread for yeast rolls.

The strategy of the Tortoise Diet™ is not starving fat off, but outsmarting it. Quick weight loss diets violate the rule of weight set points. Charging past these instead of slipping by them triggers all sorts of issues that work to make you fail.

This won’t change because that’s the way we’re built. Losing weight slowly but surely is not hard, and you don’t need a will of steel to do it. Yes, it would be great to lose weight fast, but this can be dangerous and almost always fails.

Be safe, be a Tortoise.

OMY1

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