Everything You Know About Dieting Is Wrong

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

0:22You want to hear a mind-blowing stat that... I basically think about this now every single time I have lunch. Which means that you just keep eating because you ate your lunch and you're like, but I'm not full yet. So I guess I need more food. And I do this all the time. I work from home. Often lunch is just whatever I find in the fridge. And so I'll just have a meal and then I'll still be hungry. And I'll be like, oh, I guess I got to have more. And then I just start eating like chips and cheese or whatever is around. And here's the thing. Maybe I am full. My body just doesn't know it yet. And this is kind of crazy, isn't it?

1:03But here's the problem. when we are working really hard and taking care of ourselves becomes this thing that we're just kind of fitting into the day, we're not as thoughtful about it as we should be. And that is why you should listen to the guy who you just heard. His name is Adam Bornstein. That book you just heard him mention a minute ago, I'm just gonna say it again. It's called You Can't Screw This Up. And the subtitle is Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress Out of Dieting leads to weight loss that lasts. Now, this isn't typically the kind of book that we talk about on Problem Solvers, but Adam is not the typical guest.

1:42So Adam and I are old friends. First of all, we worked together a million years ago when we were both editors at Men's Health, which you'll hear a little bit more later. And he has really become a brilliant mind in both fitness and health and in business and knows how to bridge the two. And this book that he wrote is really about, number one, liberating people from very bad ideas about what it takes to be healthy. But also he knows how important this is for entrepreneurs in particular, who do not focus enough on themselves. And so that's the conversation that I wanted to have with him today. Because we really should take care of ourselves.

2:22But a lot of the advice out there about how to take care of ourselves is not very good. So on this episode of Problem Solvers, we're going to do two things. Number one, we're going to talk about how to be healthier and why this subject is particularly important for entrepreneurs. And then number two, we're going to dive a little bit more into what you just heard Adam say there about this rigged system. What is wrong with the dieting and wellness world? What are you hearing and why are you hearing it? And what is the convoluted business behind it? It's pretty fascinating stuff. Adam has spent a lot of time in that world and you are going to hear it all.

2:59Coming up next. Do you have a work problem? Well, I and my friend, Nicole Lappin, bestselling money expert, we have the answer for you. In fact, you can come right on to our podcast and talk to us. Yes, it's true. So Nicole and I host another podcast. It is called Help Wanted. You can find it wherever you get podcasts, Help Wanted. And on Help Wanted, we bring on people who have work problems and we talk them through it. We have talked to people about how to find the next direction in their career. We've talked to people about how to go ask for that big raise. And we've talked to people about why maybe they need to reconsider how they even approach work.

3:45It is fascinating stuff and listening can help you and getting on the show can maybe even help you more. So go check it out. Help Wanted wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back. So let's dive into the conversation with Adam Bornstein, author of the new book, You Can't Screw This Up. And I wanted to start by asking Adam why he thinks this subject is so important for entrepreneurs and what he really worries about when he thinks about entrepreneurs and their health. I worry about two things. One is that, you know, we drive ourselves into the ground, right? I am an admitted workaholic, still not healed, but in repair.

4:26As John Mayer would say, I'm in repair. I'm not together, but I'm getting there. It is a tough thing, right? We love our business. We love what we build. And oftentimes there are sacrifices, but the biggest sacrifice and the most dangerous sacrifice oftentimes ends up being our health. And that can be our social health or connecting with other people. Shalina touched on the book. It can be our mental health. It can be our physical health. And all of these things combined together are what allow us to truly make the most of our time and to be great at our job. So that's, to me, if your health isn't there, at some point, all that grinding is going to blow up in your face.

5:02And if you don't have your health, you can't work at all. And then like, no one is winning, right? And then I think the analogy is that when writing this book, when looking at things, it's a great lesson for business as well in that people start looking at all the different things that they can do for their health. In the same way, they look at all the different things that they can do for their business. and they try to do all of them and over-index on all of them. And it ends up being a lot of money and a lot of time wasted and a lot of frustration accrued. And what I argue is that people need to do a better job of A, focusing on fewer things, B, being able to clearly identify what moves the needle versus what doesn't, and then C, not catastrophizing things that we perceive as mistakes, which in reality are just blips on the radar.

5:54And this applies equally, I would say, for your health, your nutrition, your fitness, as well as how you want to manage your business. Well, I think that you've just given us a nice framework for the rest of our conversation. So let's unpack those three things. Let's start at the beginning. What matters? Yeah, what matters isn't the type of diet you're on, right? Low low carb, low fat, doesn't matter. Both of them work. It doesn't matter. Your food preferences don't work. I don't care if you are a vegan or you are a carnivore, both can be effective. What really matters is building these like rock solid habits that create boundaries that make it easy for you to stay compliant.

6:31So I said like the three barriers that oftentimes stand in the way of people seeing consistent success. Because remember, if anyone's gone on a diet before, It's not that we don't know how to lose weight. The typical dietary experience is you go on a diet for about three to four weeks, you lose some weight, you stop losing weight, you freak out, you make all these different compensations, you cut calories, you exercise more, you end up feeling miserable, and then you end up gaining all the weight back. And for most people, according to some studies, about 70 % of people, they end up gaining back even more than they started.

7:00So why is this happening? There are three main barriers. You have your complexity, you have your cost, and you have your convenience. Most diet plans are too complex. Most diet plans are too expensive for you to sustainably do, right? No one needs to be sending$20 on a smoothie to be healthy. And the convenience aspect is most diet plans take you out of your comfort zone, so far out of your comfort zone that anything feels like it will break the system. A perfect example, which we talk about is like the idea of taking, of eating takeout is like fundamentally forbidden for people. And there is not a single person in this world that can't eat, take out and still be healthy.

7:37I will say that in like there is research to back it up. But we think we perceive that we need to have these very, very tight restrictive rules. So instead, what I argue is like start with these foundational habits that make it easier for you to stay compliant with your behaviors. And these are things that will fit into anyone's budget. They are things that are not overly complex. And there are things that are relatively convenient. I'll give you a couple of examples. I outlined five tools in the book. One example is just creating meal boundaries. A lot of people like to think about like intermittent fasting, do I need to fast or not?

8:10Most of the claims about intermittent fasting completely overblown. The one nice thing that it does is it creates an easy to follow structure of when you should and shouldn't be eating. So I don't care what your hours are of eating, but what I do recommend is that you have a start time for when you eat. Think of it, kitchen is open and a stop time. And what is fascinating is there was a study that looked at what happens when people just moved their breakfast back an hour and a half. So if you normally eat breakfast at seven, you would be eating at 8.30 and they moved their dinner up an hour and a half.

8:41Changed nothing else. And the people lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off. What? Why? Logically, this makes sense because like when you think about it, when you get stressed with work, let's again, bring this back to work. Oftentimes the stress isn't the work you do, especially if you're an entrepreneur, you love what you're doing. The stress is from that there is no beginning and end to your day. And it's the same thing for employees, right? Email has fundamentally changed this where there's always this expectation that you have to be on the clock. You have to be answering people.

9:11So this continuous scroll, it creates strain, stress, and opportunity for things to be messed up. Whereas if there's an open and closed time, you fundamentally have moments when you do and you don't eat as opposed to eating it every and any time. right so like you might be hungry 11 o 'clock at night but like if the kitchen closed at 10 do not eat because you're going to be fine you're going to make it through the night you'll wake have breakfast again but we allow ourselves to mindlessly eat and mindless eating is very very strongly correlated with overeating which is very strongly correlated with then eating the things you don't want to especially later in the night which is then linked to so many people gaining weight.

9:56And then you can attach this to another simple habit, which is just take 20 minutes to eat. A lot of times people end up feeling full for, or not feeling full for two reasons. One, the average person takes eight minutes to eat a meal. And I know myself, I eat lunch in front of my computer every single day. So you're scarfing it down, you're trying to squeeze it in. It takes 20 minutes though, for you to digest food and for your stomach to send a signal to your brain to say, Hey, I'm full. So oftentimes you can eat a lot of food and you're like, I'm still hungry. The issue isn't that you're still hungry.

10:25The issue is you didn't give your body enough time to digest and say that like, I am full. I don't need any more. And to compound that, your eyes actually help you feel full, right? Your brain is the quarterback of your body. And when you are scrolling on your phone, looking on your computer, watching TV, you're not paying attention to what's on your plate. They've done research where they have people eat meals, but they can see what's on their plate or when they can't. And there's the same food on the plate, but in one condition you can see and the other you can't. When you're not paying attention.

10:53You eat nearly a third more food and it's that simple. When your eyes are paying attention to what you're eating, it also sends that signal to your brain to say like, this is going to be enough food. So one of the simplest things people can do is just have that open and closed kitchen and also just be more mindful and slow down. And it helps you control hunger much easier. That is fascinating. I'll tell you something that what you were saying reminded me of, which I'm going to say these words and they are not going to sound like they are revelatory, but for me, they were, which is when, so you and I both worked at Men's Health a long time ago.

11:31We worked in different offices. I don't remember if your office had a bounty of snacks, but ours did. It did. And that was the first time I worked at an office with a bounty of snacks. And so basically, every time I walked by the snacks, I took some. And then I started keeping them in my office. And when they're there, you're kind of always aware that they're there. And then you're thinking, should I eat them now? Maybe I'll wait like two minutes. Should I eat them now? All right, fine. And then I just kept eating them. And at some point, I realized this is probably not good for me. And the very small change that I made was to stop bringing them to my office.

12:11Like just stop having them in front of me at my desk. And that by itself significantly reduced my desire for the snacks. Like my desire for the snacks seemed to be correlated with them being within eyesight of me. And when they weren't, I wanted them less, which means that I didn't really need them so much. And what you're describing here about how we eat mindlessly and how sometimes our actions are not directly correlated to our needs. Reminded me a lot of this very simple lesson that I learned about the snacks. There's a fantastic study that people reference quite a bit that was done at Google, where they're seeing the same thing with the Googlers with all the snacks for eating too much.

12:53And what did they do to see if they could make people eat less? Because they just made it harder for people to grab the snacks, right? So again, we talk about the complexity, cost, and convenience, and it works in inverse, right? When diets feel inconvenient, it's very difficult for them to be sustainable. When food feels very convenient, like a snack bean right there, it's easy for us to grab. So what they did was they just moved the snacks further away in an area where you would have to work to get it. And what they found is that people ate on average 200 calories less per day, 1 ,000 calories per week.

13:25People were losing pounds by simply moving it further away in the same way. And that is, I think, one of the biggest keys, right? Like we, I talk about a lot of this in the book, that so many diets tend to thrive and get attention because we make them seem complex, right? And we do this for a reason. Complexity grabs attention. Anyone who pays attention to social media knows that like the thing that seems new and novel, even if it has nothing backing it, can get a lot more buzz than the thing that is maybe boring and effective. Diets thrive on creating the complex because it lights up areas in your brain that make you think it is more likely to be effective, even if it has no evidence that it actually works.

14:07And the things that are actually most proven from a dietary standpoint tend to be pretty boring that when you hear them move things further away, just as it worked for you, it sounds so rudimentary that you're like, that's so dumb, it couldn't possibly work. But when you do it, it is incredibly effective. And the beauty of that is when you do something that is effective, patterns of behavior shows you like positive behavior reinforces positive behavior. You start seeing better results. You start feeling more in control. And that's where you're in a mindset of like, you can't screw this up. Behavioral change is based on a very, very simple principle.

14:41And that is make it so easy that it's hard to fail. Not because we don't want to get in the complex, but your ability to take on the complex is dependent on your ability to master the basic. And in health, and I would argue in business as well, we want to jump in right to the complex before we have mastered the basic. And doing so causes two huge problems. One, you never master the complex because you didn't get the basic. And two, you underestimate how many of your results you could get just by being really good at doing basic things. Also in business, you learn about incentives. and the important thing to know about how consumers think or how businesses are built or how to work with partners is to understand incentive structures.

15:32Why is someone incentivized to do something or to not do something? And I think it's worth noting here as we talk about maybe the lots of diets that people have been presented with, navigate, try, is that number one, the incentives of someone who comes up with a diet is to generally sell a diet book and you can't fill a whole book on a very simple idea. You have to fill it with a complicated idea because that's how you get things onto pages. And then number two, and I'm not here to malign anyone in particular, I shall say, but you and I, like I just said, worked at Men's Health. Men's Health was part of Rodale at the time, which is a book publisher.

16:10And those two things, Men's Health and Rodale, pumped out a lot of different diet books, a lot of them. And I thought it was fascinating being there because I knew some of the people who were writing some of those diet books. And like, they're not scientists. who are spending years and years developing diets and testing them in laboratories. I sometimes wonder, where the hell is this diet coming from? But now there's a whole book about this diet. And it was just fascinating to see how many different diets with totally different perspectives were moving at such a clip that they couldn't possibly track with any kind of deep, rigorous investigation into what this diet will do.

16:46And then I realized that has to be the whole industry, right? So I know you have a lot of feelings about the diet industry more generally, and you have already functionally dismissed the very concept of it. But let's just talk from a, what is this business that people are experiencing, producing the thing that they are being told they must do in order to be healthy? People in business understand business. What's the business they're looking at? One that is broken. Before I was an entrepreneur, I was a fitness guy, right? I was a trainer. I was a nutritionist and I just continued to pivot. It went into editorial and then I built my businesses and I went from there.

17:25And what I would say, and a big reason why I would write this and the big reason why it was difficult to publish this, this book was a nine year journey when I wanted to write this. When I finally had it ready, there was a lot of, well, no one wanted to buy it. And there are two ways to look at it. It was, and I was very blunt. I asked like, well, do you not want to buy it? Cause the idea is shitty. And they'd say, no, we don't want to buy. It's like, we need a better hook. I'm like, what do you mean a better hook? Like, well, what's like, what's the catch, right? Like the, what's the one food you shouldn't eat.

17:47And I'm like, well, there is no like one food you shouldn't eat. And I'm like, well, that's boring. No one's going to buy it. And that's frustrating. And I would say like the wellness industry in general was built on the idea of promoting wellness, but the wellness industry now focuses on promoting industry in which there's nothing for me to upsell from this book. You won't find me selling supplements in it. You won't find anything on the back. And I wanted to write this book because the book that people need because I spent the last nine years trying to figure out why can't people be healthy, right?

18:14Like I feel bad for people that it's a wicked trap where they sell you on this idea of doing something extreme and you do that extreme thing and you see results, right? Then you stop seeing results and you think that you're to blame. You don't ever realize that the reason why you must first succeed and then fail is to get you to buy again, right? But businesses has built many of them on recurring revenue, recurring purchases. If we solve you, what are you going to buy again? Whereas wellness should just be, let's help people. Let's empower them. Let's teach them to fish so you never have to fish for them.

18:51This is their health. It should be open source. This should be free for all. And it doesn't mean no one is doing this, but it does mean that many of the biggest players are here to sell you their supplements or sell you their guides or to take their classes and do all these things as opposed to like, how do we build foundational habits? Because the focus is now on the industry of wellness, which means we can't just give you the keys, which means we can't give you something simple. We have to give you something complex that either makes you beholden to the system. You are dependent now on them, or more likely you fail, but you associate the short-term success with what you were doing rather than associating the long-term failure with what you were set up to not achieve.

19:38And a big part of the book was just trying to create a book that is more of a practical guide for people to do that. Because what happens, the byproduct is people just expect themselves to screw up, right? And writing this book, I put 500 people through this diet. And the title of this book was something else completely. And I changed the title because everyone was telling me, even when they're having success. I'm going to screw this up. I'm going to screw this up. I'm going to screw this up. And you might even re-experience this as an entrepreneur. Things can be going well, but you're almost like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

20:08And you might be able to overcome that as an entrepreneur. I would argue that it makes it much more difficult. But in wellness, when that is your expectation, when your self-perception is that you will not succeed, your reality will end up becoming that you will not succeed. And people think that they will screw up because they believe the plan is going to be so rigid that they cannot have any variation, which isn't true, right? You can have sugar, you can miss workouts and still be completely healthy. The expectation of what people think it takes to be healthy is not aligned with the reality of what you can really do.

20:35And that is a foundational principle of the book. And two, the idea that as time goes on, it's only going to get more and more complicated, I argue the opposite. It gets easier because the more that you start to master these behaviors, the more you understand how to bend them and adapt them to your lifestyle because you get more comfortable with the routine, not the opposite. Plans get easier as they go on. They do not get harder. And if your plan that you are on is becoming more complicated, it's likely because someone's either trying to promote fear or trying to sell you something. And neither of those two things are likely to make you healthier.

21:0815 minutes in, somebody is thinking, didn't you say that there was going to be a framework to this conversation? You're going to go A, B, C, and then did you abandon? But I would argue, Adam Bornstein, that we combined A and B in what we were just talking about there, what matters, what doesn't. But briefly, before we end here, stop catastrophizing. Tell me about that. So it's what I was just mentioning. At some point when you're on a diet, you're going to eat takeout, you're going to have sugar, you're going to miss a workout, you're not going to sleep well. And one of two things happen. A, excuse my language, you say fuck it.

21:39And you're like, I screwed up so badly, I'll get to it next Monday. Next Monday becomes the following Monday, the following Monday becomes the following year. This is where New Year's resolutions are founded on people who just get in the fuck it mode. And it happens a lot at the end of the year, right? You have your holiday parties. You're like, screw it. You know, I'm done. Or you do this thing. You have dessert. You go out, you drink some alcohol. And the next day you decide to fast completely and do three workouts and you punish yourself. And that punishing yourself beats you down so that you end up saying fuck it.

22:08So both roads in this tree ends up you saying fuck it. You're burned out and be like, it's too hard to be healthy. And well, research is pretty strong on this, both on the psychological and on the physiological side is that these things that we think are mistakes are not, our bodies are very, very resilient, right? We can handle dessert. We can handle a little bit of alcohol. We can handle missed workouts. What we can't handle is punishing ourselves mentally and physically for bumps in the road that are programmed and planned and are expected, right? So what I argue in the book, I'm gonna explain and break down of like how to then execute this, you know, from a dietary and exercise standpoint point is the goal is actually never to have 100 % weeks.

22:46Do not put that pressure yourself to have 100 % weeks because you're going to break down. You're going to think you're going to screw up. It is perfection is a myth, right? The goal is to have no 0 % weeks. And it is another beautiful analogy for work. Like there's going to be some difficult weeks where it doesn't go all your way. You don't know what's going on with your employees or you're a solopreneur and you got to figure it out. But no matter how hard it is, the goal isn't just to mail it in and act like you can't come back. I give the analogy of sports, right? If every team that was down in the fourth quarter decided to quit because the beginning of the game didn't go their way, sports wouldn't be entertaining.

23:19But like comebacks happen all the time because like the game is long, right? Your week is long. If you have a couple bad meals, it doesn't matter. Just return to normal behaviors and everything will be fine. Don't aim for the 100 % weeks, no 0 % weeks. That is the true path of health. You can't screw this up. That's why you called it. You can't screw this up. That is you can't. The plan is easier and you can't screw this up because the mistakes are part of the journey. Adam Bordstein, always a pleasure. Thanks, bud. Again, you can get Adam's new book. You can't screw this up wherever you get books, Amazon, your local bookstore, whatever.