The sleeping dragon of rebellion 24 For the record a year or so later, after a trip to Europe, I regained all of the weight I had lost and realized that to make this diet a long-term, healthy eating lifestyle, it needed some refining. Focusing on the psychological issues, I lost the weight again and have now kept it off for five years. I know I won’ t have a problem keeping it off in the longterm. How can I say that with confidence? Simple. It is not particularly difficult – it involves little, self-discipline. Ad libitum dieting In a later chapter I’ ll explore why this diet worked at a physiological level but at this point I’ m more interested in a key element of this diet – what is known as ad libitum dieting. As I watched Larry eating a juicy eye fillet steak with a béarnaise sauce with vegetables( no potato or fries), followed by strawberries and cream, I thought, with great courage,‘ I can do that’. In fact, I thought, I could eat that way forever if I lost weight! This approach to ad libitum dieting was probably first popularized with the Atkins diet. Even though research shows it to be effective, I am otherwise not a great fan of the Atkins diet, but this allowance of unlimited eating was, for me, its greatest strength. The problem with the Atkins diet is that it causes deprivation at another level. Because it limits fruit and various vegetables that are higher in carbohydrate, people start to feel deprived of these foods. This was a serious problem. as later research into glycemic load Unlike the Atkins diet, which I had considered briefly, the French diet allowed us to eat pretty much all foods – the main rule was that we could not combine foods rich in carbohydrates with foods rich in animal fats. At the time I thought there was something magical about this separation of foods but I’ ve since realized that the secret was as much at a psychological level than at a physiological level. Physiologically foods that are high in both rich carbohydrates and fat – what I call suicide foods – simply have more energy in them than we can typically hope to burn off, so we lay the excess down as fat.