InnerPlate.com
Eight Principles of the InnerPlate Diet
There are eight core principles that the InnerPlate.com diet is aligned with. Together they provide a system for losing weight that requires no thought, very little time or effort, and ends up with your mind - your "inner plate" - trained to make the correct food and portion choices in the face of seriously distorted social cues society now presents us with.
Principle 1: We Live in Broken Food Society, So We Must Develop Our Own Inner Plate
Principle 2: Instinct- An Indirect Achievement Path to Developing Your Inner Plate
Principle 3: Separate Weight Loss and Exercise Initiatives
Principle 4: Don't Start an Exercise Program at the Same Time
Principle 5: Commitment Planning - Believe In and Trust Your Diet
Principle 6: Simple and Short, No Fluff and in Under 3 Minutes Per Day
Principle 7: The Right Tools- Get a Good, Simple Scale and 3 Identical 1 Cup Measuring Cups
Principle 8: Stabilization Commitments- Fixing Why Weight Comes Back
Principle #1- We Live in Broken Food Society, So We Must Develop Our Own Inner Plate
50 years ago, almost no one was overweight in North America. Even 25 years ago. Hop on a plane and visit another country, and you'll see that most countries aren't full of overweight people.
But not in North America. We're killing ourselves.
If one fish dies in a pond, there was something wrong with the fish. If a lot of fish die, there is something wrong in their environment.
Similarly, if one person among many is obese, there is a physical or unique personality cause unique to that person. If many people among us are obese, there is something wrong in the environment.
There are many things wrong with our current food environment, but they are easily and widely understood. The number one issue is probably poor food choices easily available- both in stores and in restaurants. This includes food with ingredients that make it easier to consume calories quicker (calorie dense foods) as well as ingredients that incline more eating (sugar and fat that encourage eating for enjoyment rather then sustenance). Add unhealthy portion sizes to this situation and it's not too hard to see why things are the way there are today. The average Coke has gone from 6 oz (1916) to 12 oz (the typical can as well as THE CHILD serving size at McDonald's) or even 21 oz (the McDonald's medium size standard) per serving.
The goal of the InnerPlate diet is to develop your instincts regarding what you eat and what impact it has on your weight. To get to your inner instincts, the diet is made to be simple, and to operate at a near unconscious level. All you do is track and let InnerPlate.com reflect back to you, indirectly, the impact of your activities.
- daily velocity...how your choices are impacting the day
- weekly velocity...how your choices are impacting the week
- month velocity...how your choices are impacting the month
- commitment velocity...how your choices are impacting the commitment period (typically 3 months)
- weight goal velocity...how your choices are impacting your overall goal
InnerPlate gives 5 levels of feedback. Track and keep your velocity in the green at all 5 levels. If you want to lose weight, your only goals: 1. track portions, and 2. keep your feedback measures reading green. If 2 isn't happening yet, just keep your overall plan up-to-date. The feedback model should encourage you over time to align behavior with real-world goals. And the goals are always current due to InnerPlate's flexible commitment planning capabilities.
The bottom line is that it's very hard to keep top-of-mind what the impact of our choices are. By connecting our choices to outcomes a day, a week, a month, and three months away, we train our mind to recognize the impact of our choices.
Important Note: If you fall too far off, and can't recover to make your commitment, InnerPlate.com stops the current commitment period and prompts you to create a new, manageable commitment. You take what you learned, and track to your newly defined commitment.
Principle #2- Instinct- An Indirect Achievement Path to Developing Your Inner Plate
When you sit down to eat at a restaurant, don't crunch the numbers. Don't count calories. Just eat. When you get home, track your meal. If you need to do some research, do that. If you need to guess a bit, do that. BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, don't think. The InnerPlate way is to track and reflect back your actions, and have that influence and develop your Inner Plate- your core instincts about food. Getting home and seeing your daily velocity is off, and that you need to take actions to keep your weekly velocity inline, is a lot more powerful on influencing long term behavior then flipping through a book and picking foods you don't like while sitting in a restaurant. In addition to being depressing and stressful, it does little to test and develop your instincts.
Follow the Inner Plate way for a few weeks and you'll smile when you get home and track your meal and see that your instincts were correct- it was almost exactly what you imagined. Smile again when you realize it won't matter because your instinct in managing your weekly velocity was accurate and that you'll still make your weekly velocity. And smile deeply when you realize the goal that has eluded you for so long- a healthy weight- is an inevitable outcome of your current path.
Part of the Innerplate secret is to not focus on weight or food directly, but rather on the impact of your choices- the diet velocity measures. There are a couple of reasons for this.
First, it's tiring and ultimately self-defeating to have to think about food and weight loss all the time.
Second, weight gained or lost in a few weeks doesn't really encourage a goal that is 6-12 months out. The human mind doesn't really connect the short-term to the long-term very well. What's the impact of taking a break for a few days? A few days more? When should I restart dieting? Diet velocity keeps everything front and center. The only true commitment is to keep tracking and watching your velocity indicators. If they show weight gain, you will soon be motivated to get them back in line with your commitments and overall goals.
Indeed, the greatest value of the InnerPlate.com may be that it's effective to use even when not dieting. During any non-commitment periods (e.g. no weight goals), you keep tracking and learn what the impact of your current instincts are. Then, each day you eat the same way, you'll see what the long term impact is and be motivated to change.
In keeping with this, the milestones and feedback in Innerplate are fun and achievement oriented, not weight oriented. This keeps you focused and engaged in the long term.
Basically, this principle is to stop thinking, start measuring and tracking, and watch your velocity. Don't even have goals about your diet velocity. Just watch it. Within a few days your eating patterns will change without you even thinking about it.
Instinct- Know your Food and the Impact of Your Choices.
The first thing you may notice about InnerPlate.com is that there is no pre-populated food database. This for two reasons: 1) the database should be a reflection of your lifestyle and 2) you need to know your food intimately. We repeat what we eat a lot of the time. By building your own food database, you a) become more intimate with your food and b) have a streamlined, simpler interface. By week 3, 80% of your selections will be repeats, and most of the remaining 20% can be easily estimated against existing entries. So while it may seem nice to have a database with 80000 foods to select from, the end result on the usability of your diet system is negative. By all means, use those to research entries you put into your own database, but don't ask us to make that part the InnerPlate interface.
Principle #3- Separate Weight Loss and Exercise Initiatives
Don't confuse exercise with achieving a healthy weight. Exercise is for achieving fitness, not weight adjustment. Recent studies have shown that exercise doesn't effect weight loss much- you work more, you eat more. You don't get a higher metabolism - in fact, a more efficient body may use less energy, and the exercise may make you eat more. This is probably the number one cause of diet failure- we figure if we aren't going to the gym, our diet is fruitless. That is not true, and it stops many people from losing weight. This site has little to do with exercise so as not to divert users from portion control. Other sites do fitness well enough, and confusing the two hinders too many people. So while we won't ever encourage you to not exercise, we encourage you to not think about exercise as a need for weight loss. Diet for weight loss, exercise for fitness. If you are exercising a lot, and want to get credit for the effort, simply track exercise as a negative calorie meal, and build your library just like regular food.Principle #4- Don't Start an Exercise Program at the Same Time
I can hear the knives coming out, but think about it- would you try to learn French and Italian at the same time (assuming you don't speak them). No. That would be crazy. Well, point 2 states InnerPlate Principle #3- Weight loss and Fitness are different initiatives and unrelated. So if you attempt to undertake 2 critical life changes at once, what's going to happen? What happens with most diet programs- failure.If you have a good fitness routine by all means, keep it. However, if it distracts from your Innerplate program and achieving Platevana, then maybe take a break from the fitness program for a few months. At a minimum get going effectively on one or the other before doing both, and don't let either be an excuse for stopping the other.
FITNESS IS IMPORTANT! Recent studies have shown that fitness, not weight, is the key indicator of mortality (risk of dying). It just so happens that obese people aren't fit, so this isn't noticed easily. So, if you feel fitness is more critical then weight at the moment, consider a fitness program. However, fitness does go easier at a lower weight, so most people choose to do the Innerplate program first.
Principle #5- Commitment Planning - Believe In and Trust Your Diet
You never fail with the InnerPlate diet, because it's unique commitment planning capabilities allow you track even when you aren't losing weight, and gives you full credit for doing so. If you track your eating and you see it doesn't match your commitment, you can adjust your commitment, or adjust your eating. If you adjust your commitment, you are simply training your mind to understand the impact of your current average portion sizes. This is incredibly valuable as this is, ultimately, the root of societies weight problem- not understanding portion size and impact.
This is a critical gap in most diets, where the mind balks at the grey area between goal and the path there. Your single goal with the InnerPlate diet is to track, and it takes care of the rest giving continueous feedback that makes your path and progress clear. Ultimately, if you track, InnerPlate.com provides the continuous feedback and training that will motivate your mind on multiple levels to reach your weight loss goals.
Even if you are not losing weight in particular commitment period (say Christmas), you are still training your inner plate about the impact of portion choices. Most diets guarantee failure- how many people can keep up an effort that won't show a result for months? How many people can keep the same routine week after week?
Commitments give you a plan that works. They break your ultimate goal into pieces, allowing you to focus on the current commitment, and have tangible feedback in the short term. If you need to shorten a commitment, you can do so- click "split" on a commitment and adjust the dates and goals for the two commitments. If you are unexpectedly going on vacation, close off your current commitment and create a two week "resting commitment" where you track to keep at your current weight. Feel free to create multiple commitments- the next one starts automatically once the current one is finished. A great exercise is to create your entire plan with real-world "fun commitments" where you actually plan to gain weight!
As you progress through commitments, the commitment table provides important feedback. If your Average Daily Calories match your Goal Daily Calories (Congratulations!) and your Expected Weight Loss (ADC) isn't near your Goal Weight Loss your probably overestimated your Stable Daily Calories and your daily calorie deficit (Stable Daily Calories - Goal Daily Calories) wasn't accurate. This could be that you were more or less active then your thought, or just a reflection of your unique metabolism. After your first commitment, try editing it (via editing your completing commitment) and see if you can get your Expected Weight Loss to be closer to your Goal Weight Loss. Use this number for your Stable Daily Calories on your next commitment. Alternatively, your personal calories per pound (generally estimated to be 3500) may be unique. You can use "Edit Profile" to change that and see what the result is.
The final step of the Inner Plate diet is to focus your training on portions that provide a stable daily calories for you (and thus no weight change). We recommend tracking on InnerPlate.com a final "stable" commitment where the goal is to maintain weight. We recommend a minimum of 4 weeks or 25% of your total commitment time frame to your ideal weight. If your diet lasted 16 months, do a stable commitment for 4 months. Otherwise, the tendency is to rebound to portions that in fact larger then your stable amount.
Principle #6- Simple and Short, No Fluff and in Under 3 Minutes Per Day
Outside of some extra time building your database early on, the InnerPlate diet should only take 3 minutes per day- 1 minute per meal. This is because you build your own database, and it reflects your living and eating style. Rather then scrolling through 27 burgers, or 37 coffee configurations, you only see l coffee with "Timmy's Large Regular", "Dunkin's Medium Double Double" and "Starbucks Grande Latte"- the only 3 coffees you ever drink- as 3 unit options. And if you have a medium coffee one day, feel free to enter it in as .75 of a serving of the large with a note that says "medium". InnerPlate also supports formulas in the notes! If you select 1 medium coffee and write "+30 an extra sugar" in the notes, and extra 30 calories are added to the meal. Any line in the notes that begins with + and a number is evaluated as a forumla. You can even do things like "+ 2*30 + 60 2 extra sugars and some brandy" and an extra 120 calories are added to the entry. Innerplate.com reads the formula until it doesn't make sense- in this case "...60 2" the 2 doesn't make sense, and the formula is evaluated up to the 60.And as your instincts get better, you'll be able leverage your content more and more, being able to see that the meal at Applebee's was about a .8 of that other meal at another similar place. And the really exceptional meals that aren't tracked in your current database become negligible to your overall trends. If you guess the meal to 80% accuracy, you aren't going to throw your numbers off. No need to keep adding entries. Your personal database should never grow over 300-400 items.
For where you are stuck (e.g. you bought a food that doesn't display nutritional information) there is a "Calorie Info" drop down that provides links to several popular calorie databases.
Key Recommendation: keep a pad of paper for capturing what you eat, and process them later in the day. Once a day, sit down and enter your portions. Meditate upon the feedback, and visualize your next day. This is vastly more powerful then scratching out entries on your PDA while eating (or before) where you aren't contemplating the deeper impact of your choices. Don't worry if you occasionally overeat- your plate-fu will become honed over time such that the occasional misses are simply happy bonuses that don't derail your progress.
Additionally, there is not much to distract you. You can do the entire InnerPlate diet and only ever see 4 web pages- signup, manage commitments, track food. Okay, make that 3 pages. So the result is that the InnerPlate diet is both a uniquely effective diet in how it trains your instincts, but it's also the no excuse diet- your commitment is simply tracking what you eat in a system that makes that as painless and effective as possible.
Principle #7- The Right Tools- Get a Good, Simple Scale and 3 Identical 1 Cup Measuring Cups
The best way to get an accurate calorie measure is to weight your food. You can weight the good in 1 cup portion for softer food (rice) and simply your portion selection in the future. The bottom line is that people do not have a clue how much they are consuming. This will teach you that.Principle #8- Stabilization Commitments- Fixing Why Weight Comes Back
Weight comes back on because most people complete diets without changing the root cause of the weight gain in the first place- that they don't know what and how much they should eat. Without a social environment that trains your "inner plate" to know that, the next alternative is training your mind- hence the essence of the Inner Plate diet. Once you've lost your desired weight on the InnerPlate diet you know what you need to eat to lose weight, but you don't know what you need to maintain your weight. As such, one of the most important principles of the Inner Plate diet is that the diet ends AFTER a stabilization Commitment. During this commitment period you train your mind on what and how to eat for a stable healthy weight and life. So, after you've hit your end goal, or a set of intermediate goals along the way and you need a break, it is critical to create a stabilization commitment and track what you eat. Indeed, feel free and happy to take stabilization breaks during a longer weight loss program (modeled as multiple commitments)- this training is where your ultimate long-term success will be found. Generally, we recommend that the stabilization period should be 1/3 of your diet period. So if you dieted for 12 weeks, pick 4 weeks. Six weeks, 2 weeks. Another
As with the weight loss period, you will find yourself unconsciously adjusting your behavior to achieve the goals you have. This will give you instincts on how to eat properly for a healthy weight and a healthy life.
Summary
The end goal of InnerPlate.com is to develop your Inner Plate and become an enlightened, aware eater. We hope you found these 8 principles encouraging, and if they seem a fit for your goals and style, that you will give them a try.
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