52 Diets

By Jonathan Kroupa

Anyone who wants to lose weight can find a plethora of diets and eating plans, each claiming to be the secret handshake or magic potion to a perfect body size. Hollywood cookies. Cabbage soup. Quinoa. Almond Butter. Oat bran. Carbs. No carbs. Good grains. Bad grains. Starvation. But do any of these diets ever work? Which one is the best? The hardest? The least satisfying? The one to be avoided at all costs?

To answer that question, I undertook a crazy journey: 52 diets in 55 weeks. This book chronicles my quest for the Holy Grail of weight loss: the highs, the lows, and the downright bizarre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Kroupa
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476368054

Jonathan Kroupa

Jonathan Kroupa is a software engineer by day, but an amateur cartoonist by night. In addition to making webcomics he writes articles about dieting, movies, games, and anything else that suits his fancy. He currently resides in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Introduction

Anyone who wants to lose weight can find a plethora of diets and eating plans, each claiming to be the secret handshake or magic potion to a perfect body size. Hollywood cookies. Cabbage soup. Quinoa. Almond Butter. Oat bran. Carbs. No carbs. Good grains. Bad grains. Starvation. But do any of these diets ever work? Which one is the best? The hardest? The least satisfying? The one to be avoided at all costs?

To answer that question, I undertook a crazy journey: 52 diets in 55 weeks. This book chronicles my quest for the Holy Grail of weight loss: the highs, the lows, and the downright bizarre.

It began at in early April 2011, when I realized that I was the heaviest I’ve been in my life, a depressing 218 pounds. While I had been overweight for basically my entire adult life, my weight usually hovered around 205. But when I reached 218, I decided something needed to change.

In the past, when I’ve attempted diets, I mostly tried to stay away from desserts and fatty foods. I did the Body for Life diet when it first became popular. I tried a poorly understood (by me) low-carb diet once, in which I consumed only meat, and nothing else. And for a long time, I increased my daily exercise in the hopes that burning more calories would be enough lose weight or at least maintain it. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.) But every diet proved too difficult to maintain. After a few weeks of Body for Life, for example, I became so bored with my food options that I eventually melted down and ate junk food for several days, just to get some variety.

I decided it wasn’t likely I’d be able to sustain any one diet for an extended amount of time. I figured I could make a week, but with any more than that I'd just run into problems. Therefore I decided somewhat arbitrarily that I would try the gluten-free diet for 6 days. During that diet, as you will see from the entry, I consumed a lot of candy instead of flour. This was not exactly productive. I followed it up with a sugar-free diet. It wasn’t until the third week that I tried what most people would consider to be a real diet (calorie counting). It was after completing that diet that I started to form an idea of continuing the ‘different diet every week.’

I got into this to lose weight. Some people supported me, but a lot of people were against it For some, I suspect the idea of a thinner version of me was scary. I am not really sure why, since the chances of me eating them decreased significantly once I started losing weight. (There is, to my knowledge, no cannibal diet.) Some of my friends and family worried that such radical changes in my diet from week to week would prove to be unhealthy. I discovered that, as passionate as people can be about religion and politics, they are even more passionate about what they feel is the one and true diet. Anytime I chose a diet which didn't fit their preferred diet I had to listen to an extension lecture on the merits of their diet.

Added to that was the ever present criticism of only following the diet for 6 days. Was 6 days long enough to get results? Yes, over half of the time. A lot of people will tell you that their diet requires a minimum of number of days greater than 6. It takes at least four weeks to see results. Well, then, your diet isn't for me. Sometimes they were right and sometimes they weren’t. I lost weight on 28 diets, gained weight on 18, and had 6 diets which were neutral.

I would also like to state that I was never 100% true to any diet. Whether it was social circumstances or just late night cravings; there was always something here or there that I ate which wasn't true to the diet. On a number of diets, I would snack on semi-sweet chocolate chips in the evening. Other times, I would have a dessert or other off-diet item as a result of a wedding (in 2011, a lot of my friends got married) or events like birthdays or going away parties.

Some of the diets were conventional and others were just crazy. I took diet suggestions from family, friends, coworkers, and whatever I could find on the internet. I ended up trying and often learning to appreciate foods from cultures previously unknown to me, at least in a culinary sense. Alternatively, I had some diets which I would not recommend to anyone (Junk Food Diet anyone?). Some of the diets I wasn’t able to complete, sometimes I had a lack of motivation, other times the diet affected me in such a way that it was not possible to continue.

I attempted to do 52 diets in 52 weeks, but due to vacations and travel it was over a 55 week period. There were a couple of diets which were meant for less than 6 days. I tried to fit these diets around holidays (such as Christmas) or when I was leaving town for part of the week. I did not attempt to diet when I was on vacation or out of town.

Some people who have to diet or exercise and naturally maintain a low body-fat percentage (these are the people we all know and dislike). Others can exercise 3 times a week and continue to stay trim. And then there are people like me. I can exercise 6 days a week for 1-2 hours each day and never get below a certain threshold of body-fat percentage. Despite a very active lifestyle, I had never been able to get below 195 pounds from pure exercise before I began these diets (and that was exercising a lot). One of the things I learned from this experience is that I require both diet and exercise to achieve the results I want. It turns out that what the doctors and health nuts have been saying basically forever is correct. Isn't that a kick in the pants...

How the dieting system worked

Every Monday morning, I would start a new diet. Sometimes I knew well in advance what the diet would be, and would already have purchased supplies for the diet. Other times, I would be frantically scouring the internet Monday morning for a new diet as I grew more and more hungry.

As the week progressed, I would try to adhere to what I knew about the diet. Often this would require reading several articles and diet reviews to get a sense for the limitations of the diet. Other times I would borrow books from friends and family, and read part of all of the book.

I weighed myself nearly every morning after waking up and using the restroom, but before showering. I also weighted myself nearly every evening just before going to bed. I say nearly every day, because I am sure that there were a few times that I forgot or otherwise didn't have access to my scale. Although I checked myself on the scale each day, only on rare occasions did I record the weekday numbers.

On Sunday mornings, I would weigh myself, and use the result as my final weight to determine if I was up or down from the previous week. Sometimes this worked to my disadvantage. A lot of social events happen Saturday night. If I were to lose control and eat a bunch of food, the weight of that food would throw me off the following morning. This happened on more than one occasion. Truthfully though, I'm not sure that changing the final weigh-in date would have made much of a difference. There was always a reason to binge at the last moment (the most common reason being I had probably been starving for 6 days).

I counted Sundays as break days and allowed myself to would eat anything I wanted. In the beginning, this wasn't too detrimental, because my body didn't realize what I was doing. Eventually there were times where a Sunday meant severe binge eating of sugar, bread, cakes, pasta, and anything else that most of my diets didn't allow. I can definitely see that, as time went on, the Sundays worked more and more against me.

The following chapters are all my weekly status reports as originally posted on my blog. They have been changed somewhat: instead of being written in present tense most of the language has been changed to past tense, a few jokes have been included, and some things which may have copyright implications have been removed. Any other changes are a result of the normal process of proof-reading and editing in preparation for publication.

Disclaimer: I am not a physician, a dietitian, a nutritionist, or a health expert. As always you should consult a doctor before beginning any diet or exercise plan.

Gluten-free Diet

March 28th - April 2nd 2011

After speaking with a couple of people with celiac disease, I realized my experience was much closer to a gluten intolerance rather than full blown allergy to gluten.

Celiac disease is an inability to properly absorb gluten when consumed. Although I had never heard of this condition ten years ago, I now know a number of people who are gluten intolerant and have to avoid gluten in their diet. The symptoms of Celiac disease range from itchy skin, to stomach problems, to dying