Hi all,
Friday's post generated a pair of tangents (one from each book) which I decided to cut out of the main post due to their size and editorial nature.
Enjoy the post and I'll see you next Monday (1).
Tim
I. Assessing the value of 'Eat This, Not That' for potential dieters
Friday's post generated a pair of tangents (one from each book) which I decided to cut out of the main post due to their size and editorial nature.
Enjoy the post and I'll see you next Monday (1).
Tim
I. Assessing the value of 'Eat This, Not That' for potential dieters
A quick
disclaimer before we get started on this particular soapbox. The Eat This, Not That series is not explicitly for
dieting- it is about the facts of
food.
On the other hand, the front cover of at least one of the books has the phrase 'the no diet weight loss solution'. You can't judge a book by its cover (*) but I do still take it as a hint that these books more or less exist to catch the attention of anyone considering a diet.
On the other hand, the front cover of at least one of the books has the phrase 'the no diet weight loss solution'. You can't judge a book by its cover (*) but I do still take it as a hint that these books more or less exist to catch the attention of anyone considering a diet.
*Mostly because authors don't make the covers...I think?So, what value do these books have for someone interested in applying the concepts directly to their next weight-loss regimen?
One thought I had while originally writing last Friday's post was about how many default food decisions we mindlessly accept every day that run counter to goals of healthy living. In particular, the small additions that come in the form of toppings or sauces to otherwise healthy dishes can bring added calories that I recall coming as a surprise to me when I first poked through these books.
The best example is salad dressing. I always hated salad dressing when I was growing up but I never considered anything else as a salad topping until I read these books. Once I did the reading, I recognized that almost anything is an acceptable topping and began to use salsa instead (much lower in calories than dressing). Making this substitution proved a major starting point for introducing more vegetables into my diet.
Salad dressing falls into a category of food that is particularly dangerous for those counting their calories- dressing is calorically dense yet still consumable in large volumes. These types of foods ('foods') tend to go ignored by your body when it assesses hunger levels. Therefore, since your body is unlikely to tell you that you are 'full' when eating these foods, controlling their consumption generally requires some form of your own willpower to walk away from the table.
Harnessing such willpower is a difficult task, however, so alternate methods which focus on making your body feel 'full' as you consume the food in question are valuable to know about. One good method the book described is dilution- you take the high caloire, low volume item item and add a low calorie, high volume item to make the food fill you up faster.
This is ideal for food or sauce that is rich enough to maintain its taste if something else is added to it. The best idea I recall from these books was adding plain yogurt to dipping sauces such as blue cheese.
You can also see this wisdom reflected in eating cookies with milk. The glass of milk fills you up faster than the cookies and, overall, is likely to cut down on the total calorie consumption when compared to a sitting where you consume only cookies.
The other angle presented to a potential dieter is to eat the same food but with a brand or cooking method that involves fewer calories. Two cups of pasta, equal in size, shape, and color, will have different caloric totals based on the brand. The key is fixing volume and focusing on substitution to alter the distribution of the nutrition.
An intelligently designed pattern of dilution and substitution can undoubtedly build a successful diet and ultimately improve health outcomes. A diet built solely around this book might lead a dieter to eat a cup of broccoli before each additional slice of pizza or to drink a glass of water before each additional beer. The volume of food consumed remains the same and, since the 'good stuff' goes in first, there is less room leftover for the high calorie food.
Over time, the calorie consumption has no choice but to drop. It is an appealing approach for someone who acknowledges that eating three slices of pizza instead of four would help with their weight but is unable to muster the willpower to stop eating and unsatisfied without the feeling of that fourth slice in their stomach.
I do believe that these books are a good resource for anyone seeking to diet as a means of losing weight and the ideas about dilution or substitution are quick to grasp and easy to apply. However, they most likely work best for people who casually overeat but will stop when they feel just past full.
This is because the philosophy underlying the books does not directly recommend the one thing that will work for anyone- eat less. The reason why it does not make this recommendation is partly commercial- everyone knows this to some extent and selling a book based on this advice seems like a very difficult marketing job to me.
But I think the real reason this recommendation is not made is because eating less as a dieting strategy is hard, if not impossible, for those who turn to these books for advice. Eating less, after all, refers to an outcome of the factors that motivate us to eat. What this book offers is a prescription for the effect, not a diagnosis of the cause.
The value of any diet book is similar in ways to the value of any single piece of advice- the recommendation that comes closest to addressing the source of the issue will have the most universal value. The Eat This, Not That series (or at least the books I read from the series) only looks at how to optimize the last step- your plate- and therefore, I suspect it only has value for the very specific subset of dieters that I referenced above (2).
II. The Peter principle
The Peter principle is a concept in management
theory. It states that performance-based
promotions will ultimately result in an organization where "managers rise to the level of their
incompetence." This is
because, by definition, an individual stops being promoted when they are no longer good at their job, leaving
these people in a position they
are not performing very well in.
No doubt about it, this observation is true to an extent (it may even be true on average). But some things are true and yet irrelevant.
As an example, I could observe that the air I inhale for oxygen is exhaled with a greater concentration of carbon dioxide. It might be stated that 'humans will exhale until they can no longer find sufficient air to inhale' and this is true, again, to an extent.
The observation does not mean the next step is to change the respiratory system. The challenge is to find a way to deal with this carbon dioxide and the solution, if I recall, is known as trees.
When I thought about the example I described in the last post to illustrate challenges that face newly promoted managers, I was reminded by the idea described by this principle. I can see the argument that a manager who meddles or micromanages is simply a living example of the principle in action. Using this argument, it could be said that promotions should be based on other criteria.
But the organization that changes the system to prevent the problems stemming from this type of promotion creates a new problem unless it finds a different way to publicly reward a top performer. Otherwise, employees at lower levels are shown that rewards will be linked to factors not directly related to outright performance. And there is no more likely outcome in such an environment than the emergence of office politics.
My guess is the way around the problems described by the Peter principle is to reward performers publicly without those rewards solely being promotions. It is the best argument I can come up with for transparency of pay because it provides a company a very easy way to reinforce a culture of performance without locking itself into allowing someone under-qualified a chance at a top job.
A place where doing well means good things for the employee and for the company, I once read, is a way to know that an employee is at 'a good place to work'. Overreacting to an observation such as the Peter principle puts an organization's ability to be a good place to work at risk if the reaction is such that an employee loses faith that good performance will be recognized, rewarded, and meaningful.
Footnotes...
1. Quick blog admin reminder/tangent...
No doubt about it, this observation is true to an extent (it may even be true on average). But some things are true and yet irrelevant.
As an example, I could observe that the air I inhale for oxygen is exhaled with a greater concentration of carbon dioxide. It might be stated that 'humans will exhale until they can no longer find sufficient air to inhale' and this is true, again, to an extent.
The observation does not mean the next step is to change the respiratory system. The challenge is to find a way to deal with this carbon dioxide and the solution, if I recall, is known as trees.
When I thought about the example I described in the last post to illustrate challenges that face newly promoted managers, I was reminded by the idea described by this principle. I can see the argument that a manager who meddles or micromanages is simply a living example of the principle in action. Using this argument, it could be said that promotions should be based on other criteria.
But the organization that changes the system to prevent the problems stemming from this type of promotion creates a new problem unless it finds a different way to publicly reward a top performer. Otherwise, employees at lower levels are shown that rewards will be linked to factors not directly related to outright performance. And there is no more likely outcome in such an environment than the emergence of office politics.
My guess is the way around the problems described by the Peter principle is to reward performers publicly without those rewards solely being promotions. It is the best argument I can come up with for transparency of pay because it provides a company a very easy way to reinforce a culture of performance without locking itself into allowing someone under-qualified a chance at a top job.
A place where doing well means good things for the employee and for the company, I once read, is a way to know that an employee is at 'a good place to work'. Overreacting to an observation such as the Peter principle puts an organization's ability to be a good place to work at risk if the reaction is such that an employee loses faith that good performance will be recognized, rewarded, and meaningful.
Footnotes...
1. Quick blog admin reminder/tangent...
No post next Friday or Tuesday. I am
recognizing all holidays over here
at TOA HQ but, given that I also like holidays for their reading potential, I will post something Monday AM ( probably
in the 5am - 6am range).
2. The other way to look at dieting books tangent...
2. The other way to look at dieting books tangent...
Problems which have sure solutions tend to
result in only one advised approach-
the one that works. If you do not want your child to get chicken pox, for example, you get the vaccine.
If you cannot see the blackboard,
you get glasses.
On the other hand, problems which do not have sure solutions tend to have many advised approaches. The common cold has no cure- so everyone has different methods for 'curing' it. And despite many years of trying every possible method under the sun, I am not quite ready to write a blog post titled 'This is how you fall asleep when you are having trouble falling asleep'.
The dieting concept falls into the second category, I think, based on all the different types of diet available to the average consumer. There is the paleo thing, or the Mediterranean thing, or maybe just eat at Subway only...the list goes on and on. Anyone with no knowledge of the subject could, just from generalizing the problem based on the sheer number of solutions available, conclude that there is no real solution out at the moment.
The only method that will actually work is to eat less. The problem with that as 'advice' is that it comes off as naive, or at least indifferent, to anyone who knows that already (and this applies to just about everyone). It would be like suggesting to someone with sleeping problems that all they have to do is 'sleep more'.
On the other hand, problems which do not have sure solutions tend to have many advised approaches. The common cold has no cure- so everyone has different methods for 'curing' it. And despite many years of trying every possible method under the sun, I am not quite ready to write a blog post titled 'This is how you fall asleep when you are having trouble falling asleep'.
The dieting concept falls into the second category, I think, based on all the different types of diet available to the average consumer. There is the paleo thing, or the Mediterranean thing, or maybe just eat at Subway only...the list goes on and on. Anyone with no knowledge of the subject could, just from generalizing the problem based on the sheer number of solutions available, conclude that there is no real solution out at the moment.
The only method that will actually work is to eat less. The problem with that as 'advice' is that it comes off as naive, or at least indifferent, to anyone who knows that already (and this applies to just about everyone). It would be like suggesting to someone with sleeping problems that all they have to do is 'sleep more'.
