The Slacker Diet: How to Lose Pounds Without Lifting a Weight

When I first heard about a weight loss expert that said to go ahead and shirk workouts, there was a lot of eye-rolling and skepticism on my part. Weight loss for couch potatoes? Oh had Judd Apatow diversified his endeavors to now include both rom-coms and diet books? Then I found out that the woman, Susan B. Roberts, was a Ph.D. teaching nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts University, which quashed my Dr. Apatow theory faster than you can say “Knocked Up.”

Roberts recently wrote a book called The Instinct Diet that the medical community loves. Her approach has garnered her loads of brownie points from the people who have been treating people who love brownies too much professionally. So why has her book quickly become such a nutrition bible? Well, it’s the result of over two decades of research and hundreds of pounds lost by fatties who don’t even make a go at step aerobics.

Unlike most approaches to working towards a healthier weight, The Instinct Diet does not revolve around a single principle or technique. Roberts advocates addressing all five of factors that make us lard-asses: hunger, availability, calorie density, familiarity, and variety. If that seems like a lot to juggle, it’s actually not. Most of her techniques revolve around common sense.

For example, when you’re hungry, fill up mostly on low-calorie foods like vegetables. Make food less readily available, so that you’ll eat less; just buy less food. Combine the calorie-density delicious foods you love with less dense stuff by doing things like starting your meal with a salad before eating heavy foods and then ending your meal with more healthy foods. Get yourself used to eating healthy foods by forcing yourself to eat them. Keep a variety of healthy foods stocked and fewer kinds of unhealthy foods so you won’t have as many ways to make yourself fat.

One of the keys to Roberts’ plan is eating more fibrous foods like vegetables, fruits, oatmeal, and whole grains, while also making sure to get in lean protein like eggs, chicken, and fish. Most importantly, never eat your favorite fatty foods by themselves. Eat them with some healthy, fiber-rich foods, so you can’t eat as much. There’s only so much room in your stomach, so don’t make it full of the materials of thunder thighs; make it mostly full of stuff that’ll keep you svelte and enjoy a smaller portion of the fattening stuff you love so much.

The Instinct Diet certainly isn’t going to make lights go off or exclamations of “Eureka!” hail from your scale, but it does make sense and seem to work. And anything that shaves off time at the gym while also shaving off the pounds is okay by me.