Do you remember the Change One diet and fitness plan?
I expect you probably don't, it was a brief flash-in-the-pan thing that didn't take off the way the diet's creators were hoping it would. And those creators were... The Reader's Digest.
Literally, it was the Readers Digest – the magazine. Staff writers and editors. They created a diet and fitness plan for a book they were trying to sell.
I first encountered the Change One plan back in the early 2000s when the Reader's Digest magazine ran a few articles promoting the diet and the book they had published about it. They were probably hoping it would pick up the kind of traction the CSIRO's Total Wellbeing Diet had (and still has), but it didn't. They did reissue it in 2014, but the Readers Digest don't even mention it any more.
And yet, it was actually a really good idea. I didn't manage to read the book until a couple of years ago when I found it in a library, and the book itself was... well, it's what you might expect from a diet book written by the dietitians employed by the Reader's Digest. Which is to say: largely indistinguishable from any other cookbook based on a diet, and filled with recipes and "meal plans" that no one has time for.
I don't know why dietitians who write books with meal plans forget that most of us work full time and have no energy to cook, but they do. They seem to assume we've all got buckets of time to spend on food preparation and we're all really engaged in making "proper" meals in the kitchen. We are not. Those of us who aren't super food conscious are just looking for something we can throw together after work without a lot of planning, preparation or forethought. And, I think I'm not alone in saying this, we don't really want a meal plan that involves thinking of 21 different meals for the week. Eating the same thing for several lunches is okay. It really is.
But I digress.
Apart from the fact that the Change One meal plan had the same problems as pretty much every meal plan book I've ever seen, it was kind of sensible. Remarkably so.
In fact, I would go so far as to say the Change One programme (or, at least, the basic concepts behind it) was one of the best I've ever seen. Even better – dare I say it – than the CSIRO programmes. I think, if you put the CSIRO programme and the Change One programme into a blender, you might end up with one of the best things ever produced in this genre.
The basic idea behind the Change One programme was that you focus on changing one thing at a time. Instead of overhauling your entire diet, you overhaul breakfast. Spend a couple of weeks getting some new breakfast habits bedded down. Then change one aspect of your exercise habits, like making a point to go for a walk at the same time every afternoon.
After a few weeks of eating your overhauled breakfast and going for a walk every afternoon – so that it becomes a pattern you can just maintain, rather than something you consciously have to work on – change what you do for lunch, and build some healthier habits around that. And so forth and so on; just keep changing one part of your life at a time, give yourself a few weeks to absorb the new habits, and then stack another habit change on top of that.
A heck of a lot of the book was just the “sensible” advice you would get from your average middle-aged GP, who has seen the fads but isn't invested in them. Sure, the composition of the food they recommended was based on the preference for “low fat” food that existed at the time, but the idea behind the programme – that you overhaul your life one change at a time, and keep everything you do at a level you can maintain long term – is a good one.
I have a habit of reading self-help books for fun. They normally are a bit like reading a science fiction novel, or a holiday romance or cosy crime: something comfortingly familiar, but you aren't going to suddenly go out and fly a space ship, fall in love with a billionaire or solve a murder. I'm also not going to suddenly get my act together because I read a book that recommended I eat X number of calories in a day. I'm not going to count calories; I don't mix maths and food.
But, what I will do is potentially listen to a little bit of sensible advice that can work with my stupid executive dysfunction.
I may not do it immediately, but eventually something might stick. I can't remember the details of the diet, now that it's been a few years since I read it, but the idea of gradual, stacked improvements has been floating around in the soup that is my brain for some time now, and might eventually do me some good. Who knows?
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