When was the last time you tried a fad diet, cleanse, or some other quick fix for weight loss?
Let me ask you- did it work, and are you still keeping to it today?
The answer is likely that it may have worked for a short period of time, until it just became too difficult to keep up with or until you lost the desire to continue. After following a restrictive diet, you may be left wondering why you weren’t able to stick to it for a long period of time. This often cycles into feelings of shame, leaving you questioning your willpower or your ability to make lasting changes in your life.
In fact, many people experience temporary success from dieting, because most diets disproportionately restrict entire food groups, macronutrients, or certain high-calorie foods which inevitably leads to short term weight loss. However, this approach is not healthy or sustainable. According to the latest weight loss research, the majority of people gain back most of the weight they lose while dieting and even end up weighing more than they did to begin with. (Ge L, 2020)
Why does this happen? Here’s a little scientific background to explain the dieting cycle:
Your body maintains a weight “set point”, that it defends and tries to maintain within a ~5 lb range at all times. Your weight set point is linked to your basal metabolic rate (BMR), or what most people refer to as their metabolism. Your body maintains an energy balance by taking in food and burning off those calories through: activity-related energy expenditure (exercise), and resting energy expenditure (BMR). Excess energy/calories are mainly stored as fat- and conversely- when the body needs extra energy, it mainly burns fat (along with other forms of stored energy in your body that your body uses as well). Your body will increase or decrease your resting energy expenditure to try to keep your weight set point constant. There are many physiological mechanisms that your body uses to exquisitely regulate your energy balance and maintain your weight set point.
When you go on a diet and lose weight, your body’s weight set point is altered. It then increases some hormones, and decreases other hormones that physiologically often cause you to gain back the weight and return back to your weight set point:
* Ghrelin is a powerful hunger-stimulating hormone that is released from the stomach and pancreas. It increases your appetite, and even makes foods high in calories appealing to you. Ghrelin also enables overeating by blocking sensations you get from feeling full. It can also decrease resting energy expenditure, which increases fat stores. When you lose weight, Ghrelin is often increased as a compensatory mechanism.
* Leptin, PYY, CCK, GLP-1, and Amylin are hormones and peptides that are released from the gut or pancreas that act to make you feel full, decrease your appetite, increase resting energy expenditure, and store less food as fat. When you lose weight, these are reduced, which may leave you feeling less satisfied and craving more food.
* Cortisol is your primary stress hormone. After restrictive diets, cortisol levels spike, which often increases anxiety and binge-eating.
Thus, during and after a diet, these physiological mechanisms will make it harder to lose weight and often cause you to gain back the weight – IF you don’t have the proper support and guidance to build long-lasting, healthy eating habits that are maintainable.
So, if being on a strict diet ever made you feel out of control, helpless, or like a failure – know that your diet likely did NOT fail because you lacked willpower or motivation. Your body is physiologically designed to combat food restriction in order to maintain metabolic equilibrium.
Ultimately, restrictive diets and quick fixes do not teach you how to create long lasting habits, nor do they provide guidance on how to react to hormonal shifts and raging appetite levels. There’s a reason why chronic dieters often feel stranded or lost without a set of “food rules” to follow- they weren’t given education on how to change their habits in a realistic way, or how to manage when their emotions or physiological reactions lead them astray from their goals.
Restrictive diets promoted by the diet industry offer a shallow way of approaching weight loss, as they don’t take into account your individual health conditions, your unique lifestyle, your body image, or foods you enjoy. They also don’t solve the underlying problems that may be holding you back from reaching your goal weight. To develop an eating pattern that is sustainable, you need to do some internal work to consider what your unique challenges are when it comes to eating, what habits you need to work on, and what steps you can take to balance your lifestyle in a realistic way.
3 Keys for Building a Healthy Lifestyle for the Long Term
1. Balance
When trying to create a healthy lifestyle, it’s easy for people to get trapped into black-and-white thinking or an extreme mindset. This means that they may become too rigid in their perception of food, without allowing for flexibility in terms of their food choices. If you try to eat “perfectly” and don’t allow yourself any flexibility in terms of what you eat, then when you eat something that you consider unhealthy, you may feel like you failed – which will often lead you to feel like you fell off the bandwagon, and you may as well give up and strive to be perfect the next day. This is not only a warped way of thinking, it will also leave you feeling exhausted and out of control.
A balanced diet means enjoying nutrient-dense and nourishing foods for the majority of the time, while also allowing yourself to eat other foods that aren’t as nutritious, like a cookie for dessert or slice of pizza with salad for dinner. By not restricting yourself and the foods you eat, you won’t feel like you’re “cheating” on a diet or being “bad” by simply enjoying some less nutrient-dense foods every so often.
Clients often ask what I think about having a “cheat day” to eat whatever they want. I tell them to think of it this way: if you feel like the need to cheat in a relationship – that usually reflects that something is wrong or imbalanced about the relationship. If you need a “cheat day” from your eating pattern, you likely need to re-evaluate what healthy eating means to you, how you can make it more enjoyable, if you are allowing yourself flexibility with the foods you eat, and if your habits are truly balanced and sustainable for you.
Breaking down the barrier of an extreme mindset and shifting towards a more balanced approach is the first step towards building a healthy lifestyle.
2. Prioritizing Your Nutrition
Instead of trying to eat perfectly, focus on developing healthy eating habits one step at a time. If you’re looking to change your eating patterns in a healthy way, is it essential to begin nourishing yourself by ensuring you’re giving your body the nutrients it needs to function. To accomplish this, start by trying to eat balanced meals. Balanced meals usually contain protein, non-starchy vegetables, starchy carbs (whole grains, fruit, or starchy veggies), and healthy fat in suitable ratios for you.
Many people come to me with complaints of sluggishness, drowsiness, and lack of focus or energy. This usually happens from not eating enough, or from not eating the right balance of different foods. If your balance of protein, carbs, and fat within your meals is off, you may be left feeling low on energy or not satiated. When you eat balanced meals, you can assure that you’re getting the right proportions of nutrients your body needs to feel satisfied and focused.
Another great way to maximize the nutrient density of your meals is to include a broad range of colors. The more colorful the fruit or vegetable, whether it’s red, green, yellow, purple, or orange, the more phytonutrients it contains – meaning more health benefits and a prettier meal!
3. Setting Goals
Before setting your goals, it’s crucial to think about why you want to achieve health/lifestyle changes in the first place. Consider the following:
- How do you ideally want to feel/think/act/be throughout the day?
- Why is this important to you?
- What kinds of changes will help get you to this place?
- Where do you find yourself often falling of the bandwagon?
- What are some tangible, small steps you can take that you can build upon to make big changes?
When setting a health goal, start off by making sure it’s realistic for you to achieve under your individual circumstances, and try to narrow your goal to be very specific. Instead of focusing on a certain number on the scale, I recommend starting with behavior-based goals, such as eating a new fruit or vegetable as a snack twice a week, or removing distractions while eating dinner to be more mindful at meals.
Citations
Ge L, Sadeghirad B, Ball GDC, da Costa BR, Hitchcock CL, Svendrovski A, Kiflen R, Quadri K, Kwon HY, Karamouzian M, Adams-Webber T, Ahmed W, Damanhoury S, Zeraatkar D, Nikolakopoulou A, Tsuyuki RT, Tian J, Yang K, Guyatt GH, Johnston BC. Comparison of dietary macronutrient patterns of 14 popular named dietary programmes for weight and cardiovascular risk factor reduction in adults: systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised trials. BMJ. 2020 Apr 1;369:m696. doi: 10.1136/bmj.m696. Erratum in: BMJ. 2020 Aug 5;370:m3095. PMID: 32238384; PMCID: PMC7190064.
