“You wanna be a cougar? Eat like one.”
It was meant to be a sarcastic comment to a personal training client of my co-author, Nita Marquez–but new research shows it was great diet advice.
Nita’s client, a woman of a certain age with an affinity for younger men, wanted to enhance her prowess as a social Cougar. The fastest way to get there–a low carbohydrate diet just like a real cougar would eat.
The advice is good not just because low carbohydrate diets are a good way for many people to lose fat. The advice was great because the rules of the Cougar Diet are simple and people are more likely to stick to diets with simple rules.
“Even if you believe you can succeed, thinking that the diet is cognitively complex can undermine your efforts,” said Jutta Mata a professor of psychology at Stanford University.
Mata recently published a report in the journal Appetite showing that the more complex the rules of a diet are, more likely people are to quit the diet.
The study, conducted in Germany, compared Weight Watchers to the popular German diet Brigitte.
The Weight Watchers diet in the study required dieters to tabulate points for the foods and portions consumed. The Brigitte diet is based on recipes with lists of food to be purchased and prepared.
The Brigitte diet is perceived as being less complex and more test subjects stuck with it than the Weight Watchers diet.
“For people on a more complex diet that involves keeping track of quantities and items eaten, their subjective impression of the difficulty of the diet can lead them to give up on it,” said Peter Todd a co-author of the study and professor in Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
In keeping with the study’s findings The Cougar Diet is easy to follow–eat meat, only meat.
That means chicken, beef, pork, fish, eggs.
In our book Fit For Combat, Nita and I give a version of The Cougar Diet used by physique athletes to prepare for a contest. It is also useful for regular people when they are ’stuck’ on a diet and want to get the last 10 pounds off.
When humans consume only meat–or more precisely only protein and fat–it is often referred to as a ketogenic diet because the body will convert fat to into betahydroxybutyric acids and acetoacetic acids, also known as ketones.
When a person is ketogenic they are burning fat and only fat for energy.
A ketogenic diet is not for everyone but the rules are very simple–eat like a cougar.
Nita’s remark may have been half in jest, but the idea of a simple diet being a successful one is backed by serious research.
Professor Mata advises people to look at the complexity of a diet. A diet with a lot of variety and flexibility could be more attractive, but dieters should, “evaluate how difficult they find doing the calculations and monitoring their consumption. If they find it very difficult, the likelihood that they will prematurely give up the diet is higher and they should try to find a different plan.”
And what could be less complex than eating like a cougar?
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