The reason for the high failure rate seems obvious to me: All four diets used similar foods and required precise caloric accounting, so all four diets were confusing and very hard to follow. Basically, adherents were asked to be absurdly careful with caloric counts (dropping precisely 750 calories per day) and proportions, but were told to eat identical foods--just in different amounts. So far, diets that require rigorous participant logs and calorie counting have always failed in peer reviewed studies, so this shouldn't have come as a big surprise.

到底为什么失败率这么高？在我看来很明显：所有的四组实验都在使用相同的食物，也同样对卡路里的摄入测量的精益求精，因此这四种食谱很容易被搞混，想要照着做也就有些难度了。基本上按照食谱减肥的人被要求过于精确的计算食物热量（每天精确的750）和各种比利，但是每天却都要吃一模一样的东西，只是量有所不同而已。到目前为止，食谱测试的参与者每天都要写日记、做食物热量计算，因此如此麻烦大家一批一批的放弃也就不足为其了。

In fact, there is a diet that works--consistently--at helping adherents to lose weight and keep it off, and which has a very high compliance rate: a very low fat, vegetarian diet, as recommended by Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, and many others.

实际上，有一种食谱还真能让你一直在减肥——它能帮助使用者减轻体重并且维持这个体重，而且按照这个食谱做的大有人在们这个食谱就是欧宁胥和巴纳德以及其他专家都推荐的：脂肪量很低的素食餐。

The very-low-fat vegetarian diets work long-term because they focus on the consumption of fiber and complex carbohydrates, which make you feel full without a lot of empty fat calories, so adherents needn't keep food logs, restrict food intake, or count calories--in other words, they take advantage of the nature of food.

这种脂肪很低的素食餐可以长期发挥减肥功效，因为它主要是通过纤维和合成碳水化合物使人感到饱腹，而不是吃一堆高热量的东西来填饱肚子，因此，按照这个食谱做的人不用写日记，也不用严格控制食物摄取量和空是食物热量，这么说吧，这种方法刚好利用了食物的自然属性达到减肥的效果。

The Harvard study got off to a good start by requiring (in all four groups) 20 grams of fiber per day and by limiting fat and cholesterol, but the reason all four groups failed in the end is that all four diets included meat, which has no fiber at all, and which is packed with fat, relative to whole grains, beans, fruits and vegetables.

需要每天20克纤维摄入量以及要控制脂肪和胆固醇这个研究结果为哈佛大学的这项研究开了一个好头，但是最终这四组实验都失败的原因是它们的食谱中都有肉类，但是肉类相对于全谷物、豆类、水果以及蔬菜而言，不仅一点纤维素都没有，还都是大量的脂肪。

As explained by Dr. Ornish in the 2001 foreword to Eat More, Weigh Less, which is the Bible of this way of eating: "When you go from a high fat to a low fat diet, even if you eat the same amount of food, you consume fewer calories without feeling hungry and deprived. Also, because the food is high in fiber, you get full before you consume too many calories. You can eat whenever you're hungry and still lose weight."

欧宁胥教授2001年出版的书《多吃让你更苗条》可以说是如何吃这方面的权威，在这本书的序中他这样解释：“当你从一个高脂肪的饮食转变成一个低脂肪的饮食时，即使你吃的东西量是相同的，你也消耗了更少的热量但是你却不会觉得那么饿，而且，因为食物的纤维素含量很高，不用吃掉很多热量你就会觉得饱了，所以，你可以想什么时候吃就什么时候吃，而且就算这样吃还是可以减肥。”