CalorieLab spoke with Reinhard Engels on the occasion of the publication in book form of his runaway internet diet plan success story, “The No S Diet,” soon to be a Woman’s World cover diet. Engels himself previously described the No S Diet in a September 2006 guest post on CalorieLab (the diet has been simplified to 13 words from 14 since then), and CalorieLab contributor Robert S. Wieder later riffed on the concept with several tongue-in-cheek alphabet-based diets of his own.

CalorieLab: Congratulations on your book, The No S Diet, which was published by Perigee Press earlier this month! You describe it as one of the simplest and easiest-to-follow diets ever devised. Given that, could you quickly describe how it works?

Engels: Sure. Very quickly, in fact. You can find the whole system on the cover of the book: “No Snacks, No Sweets, No Seconds. Except on days that start with S.”

CalorieLab: That’s it?

Engels: That’s it. You eat three meals a day off an ordinary plate. It can be anything you want, other than sweets. And you are exempt from these rules on the weekends and “special days.”

CalorieLab: And this actually works?

Engels: I admit it does seem suspiciously cute. And frankly, I don’t think I was completely serious when I came up with the system in late 2001, to try to solve my own personal weight problem. But then I actually lost 40 pounds and found that I was able to keep it off over time. Since I’m a software engineer, when I saw that my system actually was actually yielding results, it seemed natural to put up a website about it – www.nosdiet.com. And to my surprise, despite the fact that I have no diet or fitness credentials whatsoever, other people took a gamble on “cute” and tried the system, and some of them started reporting significant successes: maintaining losses of 50, 70, 100 pounds. 

CalorieLab: How do you account for this success?

Engels: I think that the simplicity of the system — which some readers may see as just a gimmick — is actually key to this. To quote Albert Einstein, it’s “as simple as possible, but not simpler.” All other diets start and end as a series of conscious decisions: avoid this kind of food, count this substance. But you can’t count unconsciously. You can’t detect the glycemic index of foods unconsciously. These behaviors are way too complicated for that.

The No S Diet, like these other diets, starts as a bunch of conscious rules, but what’s different about it is that its rules are simple and natural enough that they gradually become routine and automatic. They become habits. And that’s the key to sustainability.

CalorieLab: What do you mean when you say that the rules are “natural?”

Engels: By “natural” I mean that they resemble traditional, meal based eating patterns, across times and cultures.

Usually, when the diet of a particular thin and healthy culture is examined, it’s the differences that are emphasized, such as eating some unique “miracle food.” But the thing is, the “miracle foods” for all these cultures are all completely different from one another. How can these profoundly different factors account for the common end result, a thin and healthy population? I think it makes more sense, instead of asking what makes a particular skinny culture unique, to ask what all the skinny cultures have in common – and what we had in common with them before we got so fat. The answer is not miracle foods. The answer is certain broad patterns of eating, certain behaviors. For example, in these cultures, whether you’re talking about France or Okinawa, eating is meal based, formal, and social rather than the 21st century U.S. status quo of being snack-based, casual and solitary. Big, multi-course feasts and sweet treats are reserved for publicly recognized special occasions, rather than for whenever you are hungry — whatever “hungry” means in this age of superabundance. It might never been formulated exactly as I’ve done it, but No-S provides a close enough approximation to these traditional eating patterns to resonate deeply.

So in a sense, even though the No-S Diet book only came out early this month, and the No-S Diet web site is only 6 years old, the No S way of eating has been around for ages. There is deep historical and broad cultural precedent for eating like this. It’s not some strange, new, risky thing. Someone on the website’s forums suggested renaming it the “grandma diet.”

CalorieLab: Why did you choose these particular “S” rules?”

Engels: Not just because they start with the letter S – though it certainly is convenient that they do. The esses (snacks, sweets, and seconds) represent the three biggest, most egregious forms of dietary excess: stuff that you really don’t need, stuff that’s easy to identify, stuff that represents a lot of calories, and stuff you aren’t going to be miserable going without (at least until the weekend). And, as I’ve already mentioned, this is all stuff that we have historically gone without, for the most part.

CalorieLab: Aren’t these rules open to abuse? What if someone piles on an enormous plate?

Engels: Technically, you can do this. You can pile your plate a mile high. But I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t. Because it’ll look awful. Even if you live alone by yourself in a cave, you’ll be too embarrassed to do this.

One of the core ideas behind the No S Diet is that merely by making excess visible, you provide a very effective disincentive. People permit themselves to overeat in large part because they deceive themselves about how much they are eating. If you forced them to see how much they were eating, they just wouldn’t do it. And that’s what you do when you limit yourself to three single-plate meals a day. It’s like turning on a spotlight. It’ll be unavoidably obvious when you’re eating too much. Not only can you eyeball excess like this – it’s hard not to. No counting, weighing, or manuals required.

This visual disincentive might not work every single time. You will eat some individual overloaded plates. But over many hundreds and thousand of single plate meals, over a lifetime of meals, it’ll work often enough. And that’s all you should really care about.

CalorieLab: Many other diets encourage healthy snacking. You insist that all snacking is bad. Why?

Engels: “No snacks” is the rule people seem to have the most trouble accepting. But I think it’s also the most important rule.

People act as if snacking is this natural thing that would be cruel to deprive themselves of. But the truth is, historically speaking, snacking is a very recent eating behavior. No one did it to any degree worth mentioning until very recently – when we promptly started getting fat. According to an analysis of USDA food consumption data by David Cutler at Harvard University, 90 percent of the increase in calorie consumption in men in the United States since 1977 has come from snacks, from between meal eating. For women, it’s 112 percent — calories from meals have actually gone down.

So with this one rule, just two words, you’ve got a 90-plus percent solution to the problem of over-consumption. I think that’s pretty compelling.

You’ll find the same correlation when you look at the issue across societies: obesity rates move in step with calories derived from snacking. The skinny French snack on average less than once a day compared to our three. The even skinnier Chinese barely snack at all.

I think the reason snackers eat so much more food is simple: it’s impossible for them to keep track of how much they’re eating without resorting to unsustainable behaviors like counting calories. They can’t eyeball excess anymore, as they could with discrete meals. Excess sneaks right past them in lots of tiny increments, none of which seems like much in itself, but it adds up, at the end of the day, to a tremendous amount.

Why is it that despite these pretty shocking statistics you almost never hear anything but pro-snack messages? I think it’s simply a matter of “follow the money.” You can’t sell “no snacks.” Snacks, on the other hand, especially the booming “healthy” snack segment, are a multibillion-dollar industry. And, disturbingly, the surest sign of having made it as a diet guru these days is having your name on an “energy bar” of some sort, so they’re all in on it, too.

CalorieLab: You say “no sweets” during the week, but does that mean no sugar at all?

Engels: No, and that’s an important distinction. “No sweets” means no foods where the primary source of calories comes from added sugar – stuff that obviously tastes sweet. A good rule of thumb is, it’s a sweet if it tastes sweet enough to be a dessert: so cookies, cake, sugar soda, candy bars, Cocoa Puffs. If the rule were “no sugar, at all, in anything,” you’d constantly have to be checking ingredients and making yourself and everyone around you crazy. And there’s really no need to. The obvious part of the problem is most of the problem.

CalorieLab: What do you mean by “days that start with S?”

Engels: Saturdays, Sundays and “special” days. Special days are major national, religious, and personal holidays – days when you probably wouldn’t have dieted anyway, so you might as well not feel guilty about it.

There are no explicit rules on S-days. You can eat whatever you want. You have total freedom. Some people find this scary at first, but for most people I think it’s enormously liberating. Eventually, most people find that S-days work best when they just break one or two of the rules to give themselves a treat.

S-days are a safety valve, an incentive and a reward for good behavior during the week. Realistically, there’s no way most of us are going to go without sweets or even just freedom from rules forever, so it’s a way of just giving vent to this in a controlled way without having it boil over unpredictably. It’s also an incentive to behave during the week. If you know you can have that cupcake your officemate is eating — that all you have to do is wait till Saturday — you’ll have a much better chance of resisting temptation than if you knew you could never legitimately have it.

CalorieLab: Is the No S Diet hard to stick with over time?

Engels: It’s hard in a different way than most other diets. It can seem harder at first because it doesn’t pretend that there is some trick to bypassing the work of building new habits – it does take willpower and patience and discipline. But the hard part is all up front. Once you get past this initial hump, once you’ve turned the rules into unconscious habits, it gets easier and easier.

This is in stark contrast to the way other diets work. Forbidden-foods diets, like Atkins, seem great at the outset, because you can go on being a glutton, gorging on unlimited steaks to compensate for never eating pasta or pizza or potatoes again. But it gets old fast. You really start to miss the forbidden foods. And then you crack. Counting calories is the same way. It can be fun for a week. Sort of a game. But after a few months it becomes a time-consuming chore. Every meal becomes a math assignment. It’s almost a tossup whether you’d be more miserable sticking your diet or quitting and getting fat again.

Which brings me to another great thing about the No S Diet: it’s never really hard in the sense of being unpleasant, even at the very beginning. It might take discipline, it might take patience, but it doesn’t take suffering. In fact, you’ll enjoy food more. The spotlight of three single-plate meals doesn’t just catch excess, it focuses appreciation. And you’ll enjoy your sweets on weekends and holidays more than you ever did before.

Lastly, it’s socially unobtrusive. People don’t have to cook you separate meals, as they would on a low-carb plan, for instance. Most of the time, they won’t even notice you’re on a diet, much less be inconvenienced by it.

CalorieLab: How long does it take to see results?

Engels: It varies tremendously, though since it’s a very moderate, long-term diet, results tend to be slow. I tell people not to think about results at all – but to focus on behavior instead, on achieving a consistent minimum level of compliance with the literal rules. Instead of obsessing over the scale, which most people are not psychologically equipped to handle, get a calendar and mark off successful days in green, failures in red, and exempt S-days in yellow – or use the free online Habit Calendar found at nosdiet.com. That way you keep the focus on what is directly under your control. Do this well for a month and results will follow – sustainable results. You’ll have built a results-generating factory of good habits.

CalorieLab: How did the book come about?

Engels: By incredible luck. I didn’t have to do the usual “send out a proposal and deal with a thousand rejections” thing. An editor at Penguin saw that a lot of people on the bulletin board of another diet book she’d published (The Shangri La Diet) kept on referencing the No-S Diet, so she emailed me to ask whether I’d be interested in writing a book. So basically the book deal fell in my lap. Writing the book with two small children at home, a demanding day job, and a website to run, took a bit of sleep deprivation, but having that deal in place was a huge incentive.

CalorieLab: Who is your co-author?

Engels: Ben Kallen is a freelance health and nutrition writer, formerly a staff writer for Men’s Fitness and Shape. He had originally contacted me about turning another one of my self-improvement websites into a book (Shovelglove, the sledgehammer workout). So when I got the No-S Diet offer, it was a no-brainer to ask Ben to help.

CalorieLab: How do you plan to promote the book?

Engels: Since I’m not a celebrity or an expert with impressive credentials, we basically had no choice but to let the book speak for itself. Fortunately, it seems to be doing that rather well. People really seem to like it. They like the diet itself, but they also seem to appreciate the tone of the book, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

So, our main promotional tactic has been to send copies of the book out to media sources that might be willing to review it. If we can get people to actually pick up the book and look inside, it’s better advertising than anything else we could do. The LA Times listed it as one of “Ten Hot Diets” a week after it was published. I’ve landed a number of radio interviews. And Woman’s World is doing a cover story on the No S Diet, coming out April 7th.

CalorieLab: How did the Woman’s World cover story happen?

Engels: We sent an editor at Woman’s World a review copy and she really liked it. She told me that she reads a lot of diet books in her line of work, and that while most of these are terrible, she really enjoyed ours. I put her in touch with some successful No-S dieters from the website and she was impressed by their stories. She told me it’s very unusual — and promising — for a diet to have success stories before the book is published. The only tricky bit was that we needed a young and “very attractive” female cover model who had actually done No-S. I was a little nervous that we wouldn’t find someone in time, because though I knew a lot of No-S dieters on the bulletin board met their requirements in terms of age and weight loss, I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in adding “cover girl” to their resume. I kept my fingers crossed and ran an impromptu little “beauty contest” on the forum — how I managed to do this without being completely offensive I still don’t know — but it worked. No one (that I know of) was rubbed the wrong way, and I quickly got loads of pictures from beautiful No-S dieters (thank you again, if you are reading this!). In less than a week, the Woman’s World editors settled on their choice, and booked her a flight for a photo shoot in New York City.

CalorieLab: Do you have any other plans for new products or services relating to the diet beyond the book and your free Web site? Any further books?

Engels: One of the nice things about the No S Diet is that it doesn’t require any additional products or services. You don’t need any special scales or meals or shakes or bars. You don’t need to buy anything extra from me or anyone else. All you need is less food. You’ll actually save money. Something astonishingly rare in the diet world.

But diet is not the only problem I’ve thought about, and I do have a number of other free self-improvement systems besides the No-S Diet that I’ve posted to the web – some of which have also attracted a bit of a following. They share the same common-sense and humorous approach — and the emphasis on habit, on psychology and motivation rather than physiology. There’s Shovelglove, the sledgehammer workout you can do in your living room; Urban Ranger, an inspirational metaphor to bring back purposeful walking into your life; Weekend Luddite, for managing electronic distractions; and an interactive “Habit Calendar” to track and build new habits. And a bunch more. I have a hub site called everydaysystems.com to link these all together. So, I think there’s at least one more book’s worth of material. If I can convince enough people buy the No-S Diet to get a publisher interested I’d be delighted to write it.

CalorieLab: What is your background?

Engels: I studied English Literature as an undergrad and trained as a librarian, but I somehow wound up as a computer programmer writing bioinformatics visualization tools at MIT. I have absolutely zero relevant credentials in terms of diet or fitness, and I’m certainly not some famous and beautiful celebrity or athlete, but I actually think this lack of credentials and fame is a plus.

For one thing, I’m convinced that overeating is not a problem that requires obscure, expert knowledge. The solution is obvious. You need a way to see the excess that you’re cramming into yourself — the spotlight of 3 single plate meals a day. And then you won’t overeat. It’s that simple. It’s about preventing self-deception, not mysterious food substances.

Taking diet and fitness advice from celebrities and athletes is also a terrible idea. People who get paid millions of dollars a year to be in top physical shape are not going to have anything relevant to say to the vast majority of us who aren’t. The secret behind ALL of those Hollywood diets is six or more figures of financial incentive — if you had someone offering you that much money to be thin, believe me, you’d figure it out too, somehow.

So, paradoxically, being an ordinary working schlump juggling kids and a totally unrelated day job is the best qualification to write a diet book.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 and is filed under Diet books and authors, Diet programs, Diets and weight loss programs. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Permalink.