Psychological approaches to weight loss send people to battle hunger and food cravings head on. But a large component of hunger and food cravings is governed by biological forces that can be sidestepped and don’t need to be fought at all. In “4 Propositions on Weight Loss” I lay out the theory that there are certain foods that generate powerful biological hunger and food cravings: sugar, bread, rice and potatoes, plus others that can be determined by personal experimentation. Avoid those foods, and then you will only have to face narrowly psychological desires for food. Eat sugar, bread, rice and potatoes, and you will face strong physiological cravings to eat more than is good for you. Indeed, avoid sugar, bread, rice and potatoes and you will be well on your way to facing surprisingly little hunger even when you eat nothing at all, because your body will be able to switch over relatively easily to burning your own fat stores.

Going off sugar, bread, rice and potatoes may seem superhuman, but it isn’t when you immediately substitute other treats such as nuts, manchego cheese or cherries and cream (or cherries and canned coconut milk). Also, eating a giant salad each day before you let yourself eat anything else (other than nuts and salad ingredients) can do a lot to reduce temptation. I give practical tips in “Letting Go of Sugar” and “Our Delusions about 'Healthy' Snacks—Nuts to That.”

A lot of the idea that dietary fat is bad for weight loss comes from people combining dietary fat with sugar, as I discuss in “Does Sugar Make Dietary Fat Less OK?” If you cut out sugar and other troublesome foods like bread, rice and potatoes, then dietary fat will make you feel full quite fast. Indeed, big doses of fatty foods like avocados and olive oil in a salad are some of the healthiest things you can eat, and can do a lot to keep you satisfied long after your meal.

In the contest for best simple message to aid weight loss and health, I’d bet on “Sugar is bad” against “Reduce calories” any day. As a matter of public health, the message “Reduce calories” has only led to rising obesity. It is true that the message “Sugar is bad” is out there at some level, but it lacks the punch it needs without comparisons like

• Sugar is much, much, worse than butter or cream or oil.

• The worst thing about bacon is the sugar added to the bacon.

• Don’t worry about calories, just cut out all sugar.

To go further, I would add these:

• In bread and butter, it’s the bread that’s unhealthy, not the butter.

• In fried rice, it is the rice that is unhealthy, not the oil the rice is fried in.

• The worst thing about french fries is that they’re made of potatoes, not the oil they’re cooked in.

• In a hamburger, it is the bun that is the unhealthiest part.

(Update: @sudeepj21 points out that when vegetable oil high in polyunsaturated fat is cooked at high temperatures, all sorts of bad chemicals are created. So certain oils, at high temperatures, can indeed become quite unhealthy. Summing up, @sudeepj21 writes: “So French Fries just might be the mother of all bad ideas.. (unless fried in butter..) Carbs + PUFA oxidized at high temperature for a long time.”)

The article I flag at the top of this post, Bee Wilson’s September 6, 2018 Wall Street Journal article “No, A Salad Doesn’t Make that Burger Healthier,” raises the question of whether being combined with healthy food can reduce the harm of unhealthy food. She stresses one part of the answer: a token amount of healthy food can’t redeem unhealthy food. The next part of the answer is that nothing can redeem sugar, bread or potatoes. Jason Fung, in The Obesity Code (a book I highlight in “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and Five Books That Have Changed My Life) suggests that acidic things such as vinegar or Japanese pickled vegetables might help redeem white rice. Being full-fat helps redeem milk: I take a dimmer view of milk overall in “Is Milk OK?” (I have more to say on that in the future) but if the choice is between whole milk and skim milk, the message of Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So is still helpful. Fiber can help slow down the insulin response to many things.

Thinking about things in terms of calories makes it seem obvious that adding healthy food can’t make unhealthy food less unhealthy, but thinking in terms of insulin responses can focus attention on the idea that adding oil or fiber or vinegar might help slow down the insulin kick of a not-so-healthy food. But sugar is so bad, I argue in “Does Sugar Make Dietary Fat Less OK?” that the interaction goes the other way: sugar makes dietary fat worse, which means that dietary fat makes sugar worse. With bread and potatoes, I am have less of a sense. I would start from the assumption that the harm of the bread in a sandwich is simply a big subtraction from whatever good there is in what is inside the sandwich.

That question of interactions between good and bad things in “No, A Salad Doesn’t Make that Burger Healthier” is a good one, but I am turned off by two undefended assumptions in the article: (1) that thinking about calories is helpful (see “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid,” “Nina Teicholz on the Bankruptcy of Counting Calories” and “Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out”); (2) the psychologizing of the problem of weight loss. To me, understanding the biology of hunger—in particular the role of sugar, bread rice and potatoes, and how done right, fasting (drinking water, but not eating food) doesn’t necessarily lead to a lot of hunger—is a much bigger deal than understanding tidbits of psychology about calories like this:

Dr. Chernev found that if you ask people to estimate the calories in a hamburger, they will usually estimate more calories for a hamburger by itself than for a hamburger with a few sticks of celery or a carrot salad on the side. Many of the participants imagined that a burger by itself was around 600 calories, whereas they reckoned that a burger plus celery was more like 500 calories.

Don't miss these other posts on diet and health and on fighting obesity:

• Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts

• 4 Propositions on Weight Loss

• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid

• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon

• Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet

• The Problem with Processed Food

• Letting Go of Sugar

• Heidi Turner, Michael Schwartz and Kristen Domonell on How Bad Sugar Is

• Which Is Worse for You: Sugar or Fat?

• Does Sugar Make Dietary Fat Less OK?

• Sugar as a Slow Poison

• How Sugar Makes People Hangry

• Michael Lowe and Heidi Mitchell: Is Getting ‘Hangry’ Actually a Thing?

• How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed

• Why You Should Worry about Cancer Promotion by Diet as Much as You Worry about Cancer Initiation by Carcinogens

• Good News! Cancer Cells are Metabolically Handicapped

• How Sugar, Too Much Protein, Inflammation and Injury Could Drive Epigenetic Cellular Evolution Toward Cancer

• Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?

• Anthony Komaroff: The Microbiome and Risk for Obesity and Diabetes

• Prevention is Much Easier Than Cure of Obesity

• Our Delusions about 'Healthy' Snacks—Nuts to That!

• My Giant Salad

• Using the Glycemic Index as a Supplement to the Insulin Index

• The Keto Food Pyramid

• Hints for Healthy Eating from the Nurse's Health Study

• The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes

• The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes

• Gary Taubes Makes His Case to Nick Gillespie: How Big Sugar and a Misguided Government Wrecked the American Diet

• Against Sugar: The Messenger and the Message

• A Conversation with David Brazel on Obesity Research

• Magic Bullets vs. Multifaceted Interventions for Economic Stimulus, Economic Development and Weight Loss

• Nina Teicholz on the Bankruptcy of Counting Calories

• Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out

• Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners

• Carola Binder—Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy

• Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It

• Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science

• Diseases of Civilization

• Katherine Ellen Foley—Candy Bar Lows: Scientists Just Found Another Worrying Link Between Sugar and Depression

• Ken Rogoff Against Sugar and Processed Food

• Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents

• Eating on the Road

• Intense Dark Chocolate: A Review

• In Praise of Avocados

• Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be

• Confirmation Bias in the Interpretation of New Evidence on Salt

• Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So

• Is Milk OK?

• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy

• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice

• 'Forget Calorie Counting. It's the Insulin Index, Stupid' in a Few Tweets

• Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)

• Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities

• On Fighting Obesity

• The Heavy Non-Health Consequences of Heaviness

• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity

• Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'

• Podcast: Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation

Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see my post "A Barycentric Autobiography."