If You’re Only Looking at Your Last Diet, You’re Missing the Story

Karen felt as though she was running out of time.

She was approaching fifty and wanted to lose a persistent 20 kilograms. Her mother was living with several complications from type 2 diabetes, and Karen was worried about following the same path.

She wasn’t short of information about weight loss.

Karen read widely and kept up with the latest research. She had done Weight Watchers twice, tried intermittent fasting and used meal replacements.

There were other diets she could no longer remember by name. She described herself as a “great diet starter”, although usually within about a week she would “fall off the wagon”.

More recently, she had decided to stop eating breakfast. One less meal seemed like a practical way of reducing how much she ate.

Except some days, having skipped breakfast, she would find herself at the vending machine at work buying two or three chocolate bars to get through until dinner.

Karen could see all of these events individually.

What she had never done was put them together.

Tracking gives us one kind of information

We have become extraordinarily good at tracking ourselves. We can record our steps, calories, exercise, sleep, heart rate, weight and almost anything else we decide might be useful.

If Karen wanted to know how many calories she ate this week, we could track that. We could record the vending-machine chocolate. We could chart her weight for the next three months.

None of that is inherently useless.

The problem is deciding which information matters for the problem we are trying to understand. Repeated weight regain happens across time. Yet we often investigate it using information collected over a few days or weeks.

We focus on the latest diet. The recent weight gain. What we ate yesterday. The point at which we stopped following the plan. Then we try to explain a repeating, long-term problem from that small section of its history.

Karen thought perimenopause explained what had changed

By her late forties, Karen had noticed something unsettling.

Diets she had previously relied on to lose a few kilograms no longer seemed to work in the same way.

She was approaching fifty, so perimenopause appeared to provide an explanation.

It was a reasonable place for her attention to go. Something seemed to have changed recently, and she was looking for a recent cause. But her dieting history hadn’t begun in her late forties.

The difficulty was that Karen was looking at the latest part of the story as though it could explain the whole thing. This is where charting becomes different from tracking.

Put the attempts beside each other

Imagine taking every attempt to lose weight and placing it on one long timeline. Not just whether each diet “worked”.

When did you start trying to lose weight? What approaches have you used? What happened to your weight afterwards? When did you start again? Are there things you have done repeatedly without noticing how often they have occurred? Information that looks unremarkable on its own can look very different once it sits beside twenty or thirty years of other information.

The diet that lasted a week is no longer simply another failed attempt. The diet that produced weight loss is no longer judged only by the weight that came off.

The decision to skip breakfast isn’t just a calorie-saving strategy when the rest of the day is allowed to remain in view.

Karen’s vending-machine eating is a good example. If we recorded only the chocolate bars, we could calculate their calories precisely. If we kept breakfast in view as well, we would have different information about the day.

And if we put that day inside Karen’s longer dieting history, we would have still more information. The value is not in collecting everything. It is in collecting the information that allows a repeating pattern to become visible.

Your history is evidence - just looking at the last diet is missing the story

Women who have dieted for years often know an enormous amount about weight loss.

What they may never have been asked to examine is their own accumulated evidence.

Each new attempt tends to bring attention back to the present: What will I eat? How much should I eat? Which plan should I follow? How quickly is my weight changing?

The previous attempts disappear into the background.

But if weight keeps coming back, those previous attempts are not separate stories that have finished.

They are part of the history of the problem you are trying to understand now.

Karen wanted to know what she should do about 20 kilograms and why weight loss seemed harder as she approached fifty.

Before answering either question, there was something else worth doing.

We needed to stop looking only at what was happening now and make her history visible. If you have lost and regained weight more than once, your last diet may be the easiest part of the story to remember.

It may not be the most informative place to begin. Just looking at the last diet is missing the story.

To understand your story, check out the Weight and Diet History Diagnostic and you can listen to the Podcast here or wherever you normally listen in.