We already know people aren’t robots, so we don’t really “burn fat”. First our bodies convert fat to sugars, then our cells consume the sugars to make energy.

NOTE: Just as a reminder, this is why your body CAN. NOT. use fat for energy as long as you keep putting nice, easily-available carbs into it several times a day. It will just take those carbs first and not use any fat.

But when I say that all those diet pills claiming they “burn fat” are full of crap, I’m not being picky about what “burning” means. I’m saying that …

They’re lying, and they know it.

Back in 1997 the Federal Trade Commission met with diet program executives to see if their weight loss claims were true or not. Of course they weren’t. What was surprising was how blatantly they lied.

They really said — in front of the FTC — that it was too expensive to check whether their systems worked, and that it was so likely that they didn’t work that finding out the truth would only discourage people from buying them.

When I wrote about that paper, I got this email from my mother:

What I remember the most about your father’s time with Jenny Craig is this — besides his food smelling so good and me having to figure out what to cook for “1” — was the fact that after 7 months, with a weight loss of 50 lbs, on a 1200 calorie a day diet, their determination was that he could now go on the “maintenance plan” of 2000 calories a day.

My comment was, “You’re telling me after losing this weight on a 1200 calorie diet, you’re saying to MAINTAIN the weight you’re almost doubling his caloric intake and he’s going to MAINTAIN his weight?” The one sitting at the computer said, “Yes, that’s what the computer shows.” And, of course, this “maintenance diet” was a forever thing.

Long story short — it only took him a year to find all that weight again. It was an awful lot of money to learn that particular lesson.

Look at the numbers of people who try two, three, sometimes four different diet plans in a year. Add up all the money spent on “meal replacement” plans. Then remember that these are companies that have no proof that their plans work, and won’t even do studies because they’re so sure they don’t work.

Don’t diet … eat right

If you hear the words “maintenance diet”, run the other way. That means someone wants you to keep paying for their pre-made meals forever. People didn’t evolve eating glorified TV dinners, we shouldn’t need them to be healthy.

You know who else wants you buying their product for the rest of your life? Drug companies. Blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering drugs make billions of dollars per year, because people start taking them and never stop.

Sure, you could control your blood pressure with diet. And sure, cholesterol isn’t the problem we’ve been told it is. (Key quote: “Older patients with lower cholesterol have higher risks of death than those with higher cholesterol.”)

But isn’t it so much easier to just eat like crap and take a pill that fixes it? Don’t worry, there’s a team working on that. They showed that a low-carb diet actually reverses the kidney damage caused by diabetes. Great news, right? But then the researcher says:

We don’t want to put anyone on the diet itself. We just want to figure out how the diet works so that we can replicate the effects of the diet in a drug.

So like I said, if you want to pay someone to worry about your health for the rest of your life rather than eat right, there’s plenty of people willing to take your money.

When I left the Marine Corps I was within a couple of pounds of the top of my allowable weight range. Three months after becoming a civilian I got married. Either one of those milestones tends to be the start of weight gain. Both at the same time? Bad news.

For the next 13 years I kept buying bigger and bigger pants. Then I was getting ready to go to a Thanksgiving party and my largest dress pants didn’t fit. That was it. I’d had enough.

I knew I couldn’t go on a diet. I’m no good at sticking to diets, and they mostly don’t work even for people who do stick to them. Instead I had to find a new way to eat all the time, and that didn’t make me fat.

I ended up taking ideas from Atkins, paleo, slow carb, No S, Weston Price, and many other places. The following Thanksgiving I was down 50 pounds.

With no calorie counting.

With no cravings.

With no willpower.