Knee pain. Vision loss. Mobility problems. Shortness of breath. We humans are not made to suffer like this, and William Banting was sick of it.

Although highly successful as a coffin-maker and undertaker, Banting had a problem. He was obese, and it was causing him a boatload of pain and discomfort. His weight peaked in middle age despite his many varied attempts to combat it. He took up rowing. He took up riding. He took various quack-decanted "potions." He took various healing airs. And finally, when none of that seemed to shift a thing, he took some advice from the right doctor.

The prescription was simple: meat, fish, greens, and a little bit of fruit. No bread, no taters, no sugar and definitely no beer. For Banting, it was a miracle cure—and he wanted to share it. He penned a popular pamphlet which he unimprovably titled Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public.

Banting's ode to low-carb may be the West's first popular published diet, but it was far from the last. Let's take a turn through the past century's wacky weightloss fads:

Most recently, the diet scene's gone bonkers for protein.

There's a smattering of commonalities amongst everything on the list: hope, the promise of a magic bullet or magical ingredient, and sometimes, they even provide temporary success! But diets also embody restriction, shame, and suffering—which we weren't, as I said at the top, made to endure. So: why do we keep going back?

The reasons we keep on auditioning and flunking diets are bio-psycho-social. Our bodies will always urge us to max out on calorie consumption—it's just how we're made. But we live in a foodscape dotted with slick ads for tastily engineered food that's easier than ever to get. We also have less time than ever to cook, work out, or simply exist outside of a career. Process all of this through internalized fat-phobia, catholic guilt, a protestant work ethic, and the cultural imperative to be thin, and of course we'll keep turning to the hottest new diet, intoning in hushed half-belief, "this time it'll be different."

While Banting saw great success with his low-carb approach, most diets don't work. Except, actually, they could—but not because of the diet plan itself. Success on any diet is less a function of that diet's "rules" and more a matter of how behaviorally prepared you are to change your daily practices and mindset. And that's what Dr. Yoni Freedhoff's book, The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How To Make Yours Work sets out to do.

Dr. Freedhoff is a Canadian physician and a prominent thinker on obesity and weight management out of the University of Ottawa. Alongside The Diet Fix, he co-authored a clinical handbook for physicians, Best Weight, and has spent years writing his blog Weighty Matters and contributing to outlets like Psychology Today and U.S. News. He's run his own practice since 2004. The guy knows what he's doing.

I got to speak with Dr. Freedhoff for the most recent episode of Simplify and, unlike my childhood discussions about weight with my own physicians, found it to be a healing, gentle experience. It comes through in his book that Dr. Freedhoff is calm and straightforward, and he's also very empathetic to the struggles of what he calls Post Traumatic Dieters (hi—it's me). Neither he nor his book talk down or moralize about the real challenges dieters face on the road to losing weight.

It makes sense that the spine of the book is, thank god, not another diet. Instead, it's a 10-day set of experiments—a reset—that encourages us to prepare, measure, think, and learn how to enjoy indulgence. Most important is Dr. Freedhoff's message that your "best weight" isn't something a doctor or a trainer can tell you.

He also shared with me that, over the years, he’s written many a patient a prescription for chocolate. He’s serious about the enjoying part.

All in all, I think that of all the nutrition books we've covered on the show, The Diet Fix has an ethos most similar to Simplify's. It offers science and structure for a very common human challenge. Instead of screaming at you to do better or work harder, it says in a candid way, "This is hard, but you can do it. Here are some tools to get there. Take what works for you. Work on what doesn't. Go one step at a time, and be gentle with yourself as you learn."

We weren't made to suffer. We were made to take care of our bodies in a reasonable way, celebrate, and have a little chocolate.

More soon,
Caitlin

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