Diets don't work, Minnesota researcher says, but here's what to do instead

Traci Mann researches eating habits, body image and behavior change at the Mann Lab at the University of Minnesota. A professor of psychology, she is also the author of "Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, The Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again." By this time each year, many of us are already failing on our resolutions to lose weight. We talked with Mann about weight set points, eating your veggies and dealing with temptation.

Q: Why don't diets work? Is permanent weight loss impossible for most people, or are we just missing some part of the solution?

A: Permanent weight loss is possible, but very unlikely. For most people, if they lose a lot of weight, they will see it come back in the next two to three years. Your body has a "set weight," a range that your body thinks your weight should fall into. Once you lose a lot of weight, your body makes changes that make it easier for you to return to your set weight, so to maintain weight loss for a long time means you have to fight against these changes.

Q: Can't we just change our set point?

A: Our bodies are too well made and smart for us to beat biology. What makes that really optimally unfair is that you can raise your set weight, but there's no evidence that it's possible to reduce your set weight, even though there are diets out there that claim to do so.

Q: How do you find out what your set range is?

A: There's no formula or scientific method to it. Try to think about your weight history, and see what your weight keeps coming back to. That's probably about where your body wants you to be. See what your weight is when you're living in moderation: You're not training for a marathon, but you're not sedentary; you're not on an extreme diet, but you're not pigging out constantly. Your weight when you're living an average lifestyle, that's probably about where your body wants you to be.

A: People set their goal weights to be too low, and if they reach their goal weight, it will be very difficult to maintain, so I recommend that people set much more reasonable goals. If they really want to diet, they should just try to reach the low end of their set weight range. That's the spot where you weigh the least you can without your body triggering all the changes that cause the weight to come back. There's no need to go through any extreme diets, because that will just cause your body to rebel.

Q: In your book, you write that eating strategies are better than dieting. Can you share one?

A: My favorite is what I call "Veggies First." The goal is to get us to eat our vegetables, because we should be doing that no matter what we weigh. The problem is that in a competition between a vegetable and, say, pasta or a burger, the vegetable loses, and we eat the other thing. The trick is to set up a contest the vegetable can win, and for most of us, the only contest the vegetable wins is "Vegetable versus nothing." The strategy, then, is to eat the vegetable alone before you put any other food out, as a first course.

Q: Any other strategies?

A: They largely involve removing temptation from your life. Keep treats and baked goods sealed up or in the freezer, if you have to have them in the house at all. There are very few people who have strong enough willpower to resist the onslaught of temptations in their everyday life, so it's easier to just remove those temptations.

A: One thing we recently worked on was helping people remove the sugar from their coffee. A lot of people forget how much sugar is in coffee, and removing it is a great way to get those calories out without feeling hungrier.

One way that didn't work at all was to gradually reduce the amount of sugar in their coffee. Our subjects who tried that method couldn't stick to it. Going cold turkey works better. Just a couple days after our subjects cut out all of the sugar in their coffee, they were enjoying their coffee just fine. More than half of those subjects … stuck to sugarless coffee after six months.

What worked the best, though, was when we had a coffee expert teach some subjects about the subtleties in coffee — viscosity, mouthfeel, bitterness, things like that. He taught them to drink their coffee mindfully, to pay attention to the flavors. Those subjects did the best by far. At least 80 percent succeeding in keeping the sugar out of their coffee after six months.

Q: How are you doing with your resolutions for 2018?

A: I've resolved to drink more water, because I am a terrible hydrator. I also need to accessorize more.