The No S Diet - A Diet of Moderation For Lasting Weight Loss

by Anik Giguere-Biollo

Has losing weight been a goal of yours for a long time? Have you tried several of the fad diets, only to be disappointed when the pounds came back after a short time? Dieting is a $40 billion industry in North America, with countless companies touting their weight loss products and services by saying that they have the answer we've been looking for. While it's true that people can lose weight on practically any diet, research has shown that few people actually keep it off in the long run because they don't learn how to eat properly and maintain weight loss. The No "S" Diet could possibly help resolve this problem once and for all.

What is the No "S" Diet? Unlike many other complicated diets, it has only three simple rules: no snacks, no sweets and no seconds, except on days that start with S (Saturday, Sunday and special days such as birthdays and your national and religious holidays). No snacks means no eating between meals, an activity that has contributed the most to our increased calorie consumption over the last 30 years. No sweets means we don't eat foods that have added sugar as their principal source (sugar consumption has also greatly increased in the last century). And no seconds means that at each meal, you limit the quantity of food to what can fit on one physical plate, without going back for more.

That's the No "S" Diet in a nutshell. You eat three full single-plate meals of normal food a day, including pasta, bread, cheese, meat, butter and any other of the usual "forbidden" foods. And best of all, you're not giving up feasts and special treats forever: they're just limited to certain days, where you can plan for them and therefore really enjoy them.

Essentially, this is a diet that helps you develop good, sustainable eating habits through building the habit of moderation. Its creator, Reinhard Engels, "a librarian by training and computer programmer by accident", lost 50 pounds in 2002 using this method. He later set up a website to explain this diet for free after having many people ask him how he had lost such a great amount of weight without ever having regained it. He published a book in 2008 to answer questions people following the diet had asked him on the No "S" Diet website.

We all know that weight gain is produced by consuming more calories than we need. Excess is the reason the majority of North Americans have gotten fat over the last 30 years. In The No "S" Diet, Engels writes that "we're fat because we eat too much and move too little" and that "by following these rules, you get a good enough idea of how much you are eating without having to pay an exorbitant and unsustainable amount of attention", such as counting points or calories. "You can eat anything you want, at the appropriate time."

This diet of moderation is a way of eating that traditional societies, such as France and Japan, still adhere to today for the most part (although they are also now slowly adopting our bad habits). Most of us were naturally thin as little as 30 years ago, because we didn't snack all day long and reserved treats for special feast days. Now it's big business to promote snack foods by claiming that we need to maintain our energy or increase our metabolism by eating five or six times a day. While it's true that some research has shown that, in controlled laboratory conditions, eating small amounts of food regularly during the course of the day can encourage weight loss, the truth is that, in the real world, people have difficulty limiting their snacking (both the quality and amount), which eventually leads to creeping weight gain.

But isn't it counter-productive to forget the rules on "S days" and go crazy eating snacks, sweets and seconds? Won't it wreak havoc on all the progress we made from Monday to Friday ("N days", for normal)? Most diets restrict eating certain foods and certain amounts of food for long stretches of time, and Engels writes, "S days are a necessary safety valve, an incentive, a reward." They aren't binge days - although they may be the first few times, as we adjust to the habit of moderation - just days when we can relax a little and enjoy some delayed pleasure. Those days are necessary to avoid resentment and the feelings of deprivation that most other diets create, which makes them difficult to follow for very long. According to Engels, eating more liberally a few days per month cannot undo the progress made on N days.

This is not a diet for losing weight quickly. On the contrary, it is a slow, natural, and long-term way to lose excess pounds and keep them off by developing good eating habits. Habits can take you far, according to Engels, and they get easier to maintain over time because they become unconscious. He even offers a system to keep track of your habit-building online through his website, as well as a bulletin board to get in touch with other people who are following the No "S" Diet.

For almost anybody, this diet is a simple way to lose weight, as there are no exotic ingredients or special shakes required, nor are there certain foods to avoid (except for sweets, and those just on N days) and no time and effort are needed to calculate points or calories. The whole family can eat the same things at the same times and nobody needs to even know you're on a diet. So if losing those extra pounds and maintaining weight loss has been difficult for you, it may be worth your while to give the No "S" Diet a try.

This article was written by Anik Giguere-Biollo, with information taken from The No S Diet, by Reinhard Engels, Perigee Press, 2008.