If something seems too good to be true, or too easy, it usually is. Temporary fixes only work for so long, after all. They're not designed to be sustainable, long-term solutions.
For any diet to "work" (not including diets as related to health conditions), we'd need to be adhering to said diet for the rest of our lives. Doesn't really seem worth it. This said, there is something to the idea of a diet. However, the goal is not to live avoiding things, it's to become more tolerant.
When you deprive yourself of sensory pleasure by putting yourself on strict regimens, you produce less serotonin (essential chemical for happiness + metabolic function).
The beneficial aspect of a diet is the idea of crowding out — adding healthier foods into your diet, so you will gently crowd out the ones that no longer serve you. Adding more fruit, vegetables, and water naturally decreases the intake of caffeine, sugar, and processed food.
And it's not all about the food we find on our plates; the Institute of Integrative Nutrition calls this type of food secondary food. The first area of our lives we should be tackling is what IIN calls primary foods.
Primary Foods
relationships
physical activity
career
spirituality
The more primary foods we receive, the less we depend on secondary foods. The opposite is also true. The more we fill ourselves with secondary food, the less we are able to receive the primary foods of our lives.
Diets will often encourage calorie restriction and here's why it fails: compensating mechanisms defend against weight loss by decreasing energy expenditure and increasing appetite. By slowing down the metabolism, survival mechanisms kick in to defend against starvation. This then leads to a loss of muscle and a gain of fat, which is why you gain the weight back.
Some diets that do focus on this calorie restriction neglect to acknowledge that not all calories are equal. Certain calories make your fat cells hungry.
With a low fat diet, for example, the body thinks you're starving and something like the following plays out:
Eat food -> make insulin -> cells resist insulin -> sugar stores as fat -> feel tired and hungry -> eat food
Insulin is an anabolic hormone; its role is to drive circulating fuel into storage, which stimulates lipogenesis (fat storage), inhibits lipolysis (fat burning), which leads to weight gain.
People have much more control over what they eat than how much they eat. To change your metabolism, you cannot use willpower. You have to change the metabolic state of your fat. Food isn't just calories, it's information and instructions telling your cells what to do.
The body doesn't make mistakes. Cravings we experience are a wake-up call that something in our lives is out of balance. It's helpful to try to understand what you crave and when. A great way to tackle these cravings is to learn how to reduce them by having similar foods or smaller amounts of those foods built into your daily diet. This can help prevent bingeing and craving after abstaining.
The modern nutrition approach tells you exactly what you should be eating, whereas bioindividuality honors what works for some and doesn't work for others, and (something it took me a while to realize), what works for you today may not work for you tomorrow.
You are a completely unique individual shaped by heritage, gender, height, weight, activity level, lifestyle, and location. This is why dietary needs and preferences can change over time. Understanding this concept brings home that diets don't work.
Humans have a need to categorize themselves and others; it's this labelling that creates an unnecessary sense of pressure and close-mindedness.
But here's the thing. Some people need that structure and some sort of guidelines to live by. More than just being told to eat more fruits and veggies and drink more water. Many have found the Mediterranean Diet to be a very easy and sustainable diet to adopt. This focuses on the pace at which people eat and making meals into an event. There is an emphasis in freshness for food like chicken, veggies, fish, and wine. Dessert is typically fruit, and best consumed in smaller portions. The reason being that dessert breaks down digestion in the stomach and destroys the chemistry to digest properly.
So how do we find a "perfect diet"? Some people focus on being very careful about eating, while others have a more relaxed attitude towards food. Some people find eating animal food healthy while others thrive on a vegetarian or vegan diet. This is all okay! Just understand what foods you're attracted to and why. We are a relatively intelligent nation, but we've outsmarted our own eating intuition — the last place we actually look to determine what to eat is our heart.
Because again — food is about the individual, not the theory. Several factors to consider:
Gender: Men and women eat differently
Age: People eat very differently at different ages. Consider the fuel you require right now
Culture: Everyone has a genetic predisposition to eat the foods from the country where their ancestors grew up. Cells know how to process that food.
There are many success, reward, and guilt associations surrounding food; many people struggle with their relationships to what they eat at some point. Dieting puts the expertise outside of you — rather than being intuitive and conscious of what you're thinking, feeling, or craving at the current moment, dieting places all of your focus on external rules/a specific regimen. It makes the diet the expert rather than you. Just remember that your body knows what it needs.
As a matter of fact, chemical signals tell you to gain or lose weight depending on your food consumption, environment, and countless other factors.
Why is it that 95% of dieters gain back the weight they lose and even more? When the body starts getting less food than it's used to, yes — you lose the initial weight — but the metabolism decreases significantly, forcing you to permanently reduce your portion size to maintain your dress size. When your body begins to expect less food, your internal furnace slows down to conserve energy and you hold on to fat to keep your body warm and functional. And some of this fat is important! People forget that your brain is 60% fat and requires dietary fat to function.
The diet-binge cycle has proven that willpower is scientifically limited and exhaustible. So challenge yourself to eat whatever you feel like, within moderation. You have to tune in to your body and acknowledge when it's full.
When you communicate effectively with your body, no food situation will make you feel out of control. You're unlikely to lose weight permanently until you go off diets altogether. So how do you do it?
Balance secondary foods and primary foods to authentically nourish yourself
Experiment with different eating styles (remember your needs change over time)
Develop a physical movement routine
Play with spirituality (puts goals into focus + clarity)
Make sure your relationships are supporting you
Pay attention to how you're spending your time
In Western cultures, especially the U.S., people tend to be great at keeping up with the latest health trends and fads. Part of the reason why Americans are so fluent in nutrition is the efficiency of the American publishing industry. With the high rate at which those books are published and those articles and blog posts are written, we're constantly bombarded with this information and these new diets to try, and it's all conflicting. All of these diet books take advantage of that need to understand this process, which is why you have these crazy diets about how to lose weight. One of the only reasons why diets work is that they're usually better than what you were eating before (but again, only for a limited duration).
People really believe that being thinner is going to give them a better life. I certainly did. This is challenging for a number of reasons, but mainly because people have a certain body type and we can't just switch gears like that. We need to be the healthiest versions of ourselves that we can be — and this starts by listening and paying attention to what our bodies are telling us, not the latest diet.
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