The Trouble with Success Stories

Jacob used to read a lot of books about health, food addiction, eating habits, and weight loss. For many years, they were the only books he read. As he was a long-term binge eater and junk food addict, this genre choice was quite sensible. He really didn’t like being a chronic overeater, so devoted himself to learning as much as possible from people that knew how to cure it. At least, they said they knew how to cure it. None of them actually helped him to resolve his eating problems, but he assumed that was his own fault.

He did learn a lot from those books (some of which has seeped into his own solution), yet he could never quite muster up the will needed to have any real success with them. The problem was, for their methods to work he had to stop eating the way he was used to eating and eat the way they recommended instead (i.e. more vegetables, less junk food). That seemed very logical, but he just couldn’t get himself to sustain it for more than a few days.

Most of the books he read followed the same formula:

A specialist (i.e. a dietician, a health researcher, a [something or other]-ologist, or an ordinary but much better-looking than average overweight couch potato turned wholefood chef / personal trainer) would carefully explain which foods were the healthy ones and why we should eat them. To reinforce the point about the healthy foods, they would then compare them to the foods the average person is eating (one of which was assumed to be the reader) and point out all the ways these foods are killing said reader. Following all of this enlightening information would come a large selection of recipes and a meal plan that, if carefully adhered to, would result in the reader losing half their body weight, eliminating all ailments, and re-emerging as a wellness influencer on Instragram.

The assumption underlying just about everything Jacob read was that overweight people were the way they were because they were not educated enough about their health to make informed choices. Books about healthy eating (and blogs, articles, posts and videos) seem to be built on the assumption that most people just don’t realise fast food is bad for them, which is why they continue to eat it. Reading a book that breaks down one’s dinner into its micronutrient components is intended to correct that dire knowledge gap and help everyone make better choices. Yet, as sensible as that sounds, the underlying suggestion is that once all this health wisdom had been dispersed, if the reader is still frequenting drive-thrus and eating multiple packets of cookies each day, they must either be choosing to be sick and fat, or they are useless.

Jacob certainly didn’t like being overweight, nor did he like eating a diet that he knew — having read so many health books — was killing him, so he figured he must be useless. After all, the many antidotes about health transformations sprinkled through these books seemed to suggest that dietary changes were easy. The featured stories generally involved some variant of an overweight long-haul trucker discovering, on a routine health exam, that he was not as as trim and terrific as he thought he was, and that consuming thousands of meat pies, chocolate bars and iced coffees throughout his career had resulted in some rather clogged arteries. Having made this alarming discovery, he immediately switched his forty-year lunch routine to an edamame buddha bowl and an açai smoothie, and was now (having immediately resolved the weight and artery issues) cycling across the country to raise awareness about the danger of a sedentary, junk food-filled life.  

The books Jacob read always had plenty of stories about people like that. People who appeared to have been blissfully unaware that they were overweight and unhealthy until something unexpected, like a Type II diabetes diagnosis, brought their lifestyle habits into sharp focus. It always seemed that it had taken them until that one unpleasant GP consult to do a ‘Is my diet healthy?’ internet search, wherein they made the startling discovery that regularly consuming pizza and ice cream was a problem. Jacob spent years doing weight loss solution-inspired online searches, so was well aware of the fact that pizza and ice cream were a problem, yet he still couldn’t stop himself from eating them. Why did it seem like everyone else could make sensible lifestyle changes after getting a little more informed, but he couldn’t?

It was only after he had figured out his own solution to the overeating problem that he began to wonder if all the rapid health transformations he read about in books and on blogs were true. It is possible most of them are. At the very least, he’s confident they’re based on real people as there are enough ‘before and after’ photos online to suggest that miraculous weight loss does occur. He hasn’t met anyone in real life that has shed a significant amount of body fat through sheer will and kept it off, but he is sure those people do exist. They are obviously just incredibly rare, which is probably why they end up having their photos and dramatic transformation stories appear in diet books and on wholefood plant-based websites.

Jacob reasoned that these exceptional feats of weight loss must have been achieved by a particular cohort of humanity fortunate enough to possess naturally superior willpower and a particularly diligent personality type. Or maybe they were just lucky enough to be in an environment that predisposed them to success (i.e., they relocated to an uninhabited island for a year where they were forced to live off coconuts and seaweed).

More likely, Jacob thought, these overnight success stories were made up of the small subset of humanity that is not particularly fussed about food. The ones that never feel the need to look up which foods are healthy and which are not, because the topic is an absolute bore to them. Those who are quite content just eating whatever edible substance is most convenient when the need for sustenance arises. Many of these people can get through their whole lives in this manner, but if they are forced to acknowledge that their blissful nutritional ignorance is sending them to an early grave, they can also, begrudgingly, put in a bit of effort to read up on the topic then switch their regular deep-fried takeaway choices over to the dishes that come with salad.

It is certainly true that there are people who only need to gain a little knowledge (and a little weight) to immediately make drastic improvements, but those people are not junk food addicts. A junk food addict’s story is never going to appear as a two-paragraph health transformation at the start of a chapter. The failed attempts leading up to the success would require the first half of the book, and the flailing, undulating attempts to retain that precarious lean lifestyle would take up the whole second half. There would simply be no room left in the book for low-fat meal plans, hummus recipes or chapters devoted to the cancer-fighting properties of blueberries.

The anecdotes featured in diet books and across weight loss websites are supposed to suggest to the desperate binge eater (who has just heaved themself into bed and is now trying to find a revolutionary eating solution that will make the evening’s heinous feast their last) that they can break free from the food hell they are living in.

Starting immediately, they tell themselves, they will be just like all of those inspiring fat-shedders and consume nothing but sprout salads, celery sticks, and decaf black coffee for the rest of their lives. They will be strong-willed, dedicated, and develop an unexpected passion for waking up at five a.m. to go the gym. In no time at all, the skinny, healthy version of themself will emerge and they will be approached at the local shopping centre by a well-known casting director whose new film is in need of a protagonist that must look, providentially, just like them.

Having read about the life-changing transformations of the newly thin, the sickly-stuffed binge eater will now be feeling motivated and confident and will have decided to devote the rest of their sugar-wired waking moments to planning out their beach outfits for the summer. As they eventually nod off to sleep, they will tell themselves that this new version of themselves has already begun.

… Is about to start.

… Will start Monday.

…. A week from now at the latest.

Jacob often had particularly awful binges, and he often felt that he had hit his absolute lowest point. Health books, miraculous weight loss blogs, and overnight success stories were very important in those moments as they gave him the hope he needed to keep trying. Yet, they also led him to believe that success only happens for people that can instantly go from drive-thru dinners to cooking oil-free vegetable stir-fries with homemade tofu every night. He couldn’t sustain a healthy eating stretch for more than a few days, and that made him feel like a failure.

Now, if it had just been him, he might have accepted that he was useless, but looking around him, Jacob suspected that many people had the same problem. Even the most successful people he knew seemed incapable of sticking to a healthy diet long enough to shed the extra kilos, which made him wonder if there was something missing from the weight loss strategies he was used to reading about.  

Jacob eventually discovered that there was something missing. What the diet books always failed to mention was the thing in his head that continuously got between his desire to be lean and healthy and actually becoming lean and healthy. The thing that always convinced him to eat a whole block of chocolate when he had planned to just have an apple. That thing, Jacob realised, was a hungry goat.

Like a real goat, the one that lives in Jacob’s head is stubborn, manipulative, willing to scale cliffs for a meal, and really enjoys eating things that it absolutely shouldn’t. His goat, to be frank, couldn’t give a toss about the cancer-fighting properties of blueberries — it much prefers pizza and ice cream — and the fact that Jacob has gone to a lot of trouble to learn about their health benefits doesn’t concern it in the slightest.

Jacob didn’t need sensible nutritional advice, nor did he need inspiring stories about people who had overhauled their lives, lost 100 kilos and started running marathons. None of that information was changing his own eating behaviour – it was just making him feel miserable. What he needed was a strategy for taking back control of his life from a hungry goat, and as none of the books were very helpful on that front, he had to come up with his own solution.

After a lot of trial and error, Jacob realised that he had to do the opposite of what the books seemed to recommend. Instead of trying to transform his whole eating routine in one go, he had to very gradually weed out the specific foods The Goat loved and build in the type of foods that didn’t send it into a frenzy. If he went too fast, The Goat would panic and force him to binge, so he had to accept that progress would be slow. He also had to force himself not to worry about his weight or the number of calories he was eating. He had to accept that, for a very long time, he was going to be eating both his own preferred meals and his goat’s. This was the only way to get The Goat on board.

He slowly figured out his ideal meals (without any of the ingredients that energised his goat) and started eating them on a regular schedule. The Goat wasn’t that pleased and recommended many other things (often successfully) but, over time, it got used to Jacob’s meals. It even started to find them rather enjoyable. It took a long while, but The Goat eventually stopped asking for other meals all the time, and mostly just accepted the ones Jacob had pre-selected.

Jacob’s strategy was effective, but as progress was glacially slow, it could never appear as a three-paragraph success story on a weight loss website. He couldn’t even write a book about it as it would take him the first ten chapters just to cover the ways he was repeatedly manipulated and defeated by his goat. As hungry goats can’t be permanently suppressed or eliminated, there is no clear-cut before and after. It is just a gradual transfer of power as the human gets better at managing things and the goat slowly gets on board.

For people that don’t think constantly about food, some sensible nutritional advice and a new meal plan is probably all that is needed. If they wander down to their local bookshop, they will find a whole section of wholefood cookbooks and meal plans that will likely do the trick. For the binge eaters and junk food addicts that have already read those books, Jacob’s strategy might be a good alternative. It won’t be fast, but life will incrementally get better, and the changes will definitely stick.

Goats never fully go away, but they do get quieter and less demanding; they start to take longer naps. And that, to Jacob, is what success really looks like. Not the kilos lost or the health benefits gained from all his junk food-free days — it is having a hungry goat that is regularly asleep instead of constantly pestering him to eat. Without the never-ending, overwhelming, uncontrollable urge to binge, he can finally put his mind to the many wonderful things that have nothing at all to do with food.  

And he might just go do that right now.