Danny Davis
It’s time to change your habits and you change your body!
The Diet Craze
According to the Washington Post, nearly 45 million people go on some sort of diet plan or program each year to lose weight. Similarly, losing weight is also one of the top New Year’s resolutions people make every year.
Dieting has likely touched your life at some point. If you’ve ever personally tried following a diet or watched a loved one try to follow a diet for weight loss, you understand how disheartening dieting can be.
Despite this extremely high number of yearly dieters, about 70% of American adults are considered obese. If so, many people are going on diets, why are obesity rates at an all-time high?
Unfortunately, dieting doesn’t really work.
The results are usually short-lived; people eventually abandon the diet plans they’re trying to follow and often gain any lost weight back again afterward.
If you’re trying to seriously lose weight, dieting is clearly not the answer. To successfully lose weight, you must commit to changing your overall everyday habits to see real, long-lasting, and sustainable results.
Understanding Diet Culture
If dieting doesn’t work, why do so many people continually decide to go on them?
The term “diet culture” says it all–dieting is a huge part of human culture! Perhaps you’ve gone on a diet because a friend saw good results on it. You may have dieted with a group of friends before a big event, such as a wedding.
You may have watched your mother obsess over her weight and go on diet after diet when you were a kid. The idea of dieting is deeply rooted in our society, but since dieting doesn’t typically work, why do people keep using them as tools to promote weight loss?
New Diets Tend To Promote A Sense Of Hopefulness
If you’ve ever struggled to lose weight, the promise of a new, effective diet plan always seems incredibly appealing. In a desire to lose weight, achieve a new body image, or improve health, you find yourself grasping at any chance of hope you can find.
This leads to a cycle of diet culture behavior:
- You feel unhappy about your current weight
- You find a new diet to try and feel hopeful
- You follow the diet for a while (and maybe even see some results)
- You begin to feel deprived of certain foods, left out of social eating situations, etc.
- You break the rules of the diet (have a “cheat” day, eat something the diet doesn’t permit)
- You feel guilty about breaking the diet’s rules
- You begin to feel hopeless and then abandon the new diet
- ….and then you’re right back to feeling unhappy about your current weight again.
This cycle always leads back to one thing: Unhappiness. When you’re feeling low, the idea of a new and improved diet always seems like the right answer. However, following that diet often leads to complications, particularly with deprivation or restrictions, leading to the diet crashing at some point.
Dieting companies depend on this sense of renewed hopefulness to get people to buy into their programs and products. When you feel a sense of hopefulness (“maybe this diet will be the one to get me on track”), you’re more likely to sign up for their meal plans, apps, and other paid subscriptions.
There Are Social Aspects To Dieting
Most people have interacted with dieting themselves or watched a loved one go on a diet. There’s often a social aspect to it–for example, imagine a bridal party all going on a diet at the same time to look good on the “big day.”
Dieting together in order to meet a common goal is a bonding experience, and if you’ve ever been in this sort of situation, it can be tempting to diet just because your friends or family are also doing it.
When you share a common goal with a like-minded group of folks, such as a dieting support group or your own friends, there’s a pressure to follow the tenements of the diet you’ve all chosen to follow.
Some dieting programs and companies have caught on to this trend and offer program “benefits” such as a support group of people also following their diet plan. However, even with the support of your friends, family, or peers also following the diet, all of you are still likely to fall prey to the cycle mentioned above.
Diet Culture Often Pressures People Into Trying A Diet Solely On The Desire To Change Their Appearances Or “Become More Attractive.”
Unfortunately, we live in a world where a thin body type is considered most ideal. While we’re slowly moving toward more body positivity and body acceptance, many dieting companies and diet plans focus on the aspect of becoming thinner rather than becoming or feeling healthier.
If you’ve ever been bullied for being a larger person, you’ve felt the sting of a culture obsessed with dieting and thinness. The human body exists naturally in a massive variety of shapes and sizes–everyone isn’t designed to be thin!
Unfortunately, since this image is the prevalent ideal for bodily appearance, dieting companies use false promises of achieving thinness to promote their programs and products.
While some people may achieve thinness on any particular dieting program, many won’t because they aren’t naturally designed to be a thin person.
This isn’t at the fault of the person trying to lose weight–these failures are at the fault of a culture that cares more about appearing thin rather than feeling healthy.
Dieting Companies Have Top-Notch Marketing Teams
At the root of everything they claim to be, a dieting company is still a company. In the end, they want more people to buy their supplements and shakes, sign up for their programs, and download their apps. When people believe they can be successful on a diet, they are willing to spend money on dieting products.
Besides a person’s sense of hopefulness that a new diet may be “the one” to help them finally lose weight, dieting companies also manipulate different marketing strategies to make their products attractive and their sales pitches persuasive.
They may show dramatic before-and-after shots of customers, deliver a variety of statistics about what their products can do, or appeal to emotions by having customers talk about their journeys on the diet plan. These attractive presentations combined with a customer’s sense of hopefulness that they can use this company’s product to lose weight is a recipe for good business….but not so much for sustainable weight loss.
Diet Programs Cause You To Develop A Warped View Of Foods And Eating
When you’re hyper focusing on a new diet, following the rules of the diet, and making sure you’re choosing the “right foods” for the diet plan, you become way more aware of food than you normally would be.
This warped perception of food involves a few different factors, including:
- An increased awareness of what you can or can’t have on the diet
- More focus on what others are eating (for example, you’re more likely to pay attention to what your friend orders at a restaurant)
- More time spent thinking about when your next meal time or snack will be
- More time spent planning meals and snacks that will fit the restrictions of the diet
When thinking about eating becomes this big a part of your everyday life, you may find yourself developing an obsession about food. When you couple that with restricting some food categories to fit the diet’s rules, you may find yourself really obsessing over when and what you can eat.
Rather than thinking about other things, focusing on work, enjoying a hobby, or literally anything else, you’re wasting a lot of mental energy on your diet’s rules and expectations.
This kind of obsessive thinking can really affect other aspects of your life besides those directly related to eating. For example, pretend your family is going to have a cookout. You really want to go and spend time with them, but you already know everything they plan to serve at the cookout will not be on your diet plan’s food list.
This is a huge bummer–if you go, you know you’re going to end up eating foods not approved by your diet plan. If you don’t go, you miss out on some family hang time. Both of these are huge bummers caused by the diet plan’s rules and restrictions. In this scenario, you allow your diet to stop you from either going to the social event altogether or enjoying the social aspects of eating.
6 Sustainable Ways To Ditch Dieting And Still Lose Weight
Changing your overall daily habits is the surefire way to find a way to lose weight that works best for your body. Everybody is unique techniques that help you lose weight may not work the same way for your best friend. It’s important to find methods that are not only workable for your specific needs, but also sustainable, meaning that you can make them into permanent habits to help improve your health long term.
Because diet programs are often too strict and limited, they aren’t effective methods for long term success. However, changing your daily habits and developing new skills are effective long-term methods for weight loss success!
1| Get back in touch with your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues.
Dieting wreaks havoc on your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues. All people are born with natural urges from their bodies that tell them when they need to begin eating and stop eating. For example, a baby’s body knows exactly when they need to eat–they’ll make sure you know about it, too, because they’ll likely start to cry!
As we age, we lose touch with these natural signals from the body. Dieting is often the culprit for this lost connection between ourselves and our body’s cues. When you’re dieting, you’re ignoring your body’s hunger and fullness cues. Here are some examples of how a diet can make you ignore your body’s natural cues:
- On an intermittent fasting diet, you may feel hungry outside of your designated “eating window,” but you ignore that hunger urge and wait to eat when it’s time.
- On a low-calorie diet, you may eat your calorie allotment and then still feel hungry afterward. Rather than eating some more, you ignore your hunger so you don’t go over your calorie limit for the day.
- On a points-based dieting system, you have a lot of extra points at the end of the day, so you eat a bunch of snacks even though you don’t feel hungry because you don’t want them to go to waste.
Because different dieting programs and systems often have rigid rules to follow, it’s easy to get caught up in those expectations and ignore the true expert on when you should eat–your own body. Luckily, we never totally “lose” these natural cues–they just get buried under the mess of rules picked up from countless dieting. You can find them again.
To rediscover your body’s natural hunger and fullness cues, pay attention to how your body signals those feelings to you.
- When you’re hungry, does your abdomen feel hollow or empty? Does your stomach rumble?
- When you’re feeling full, do you feel satisfied? Do you feel like your stomach is comfortably full?
- If you’ve overeaten, do you feel bloated or in pain?
Identifying your body’s unique responses to hunger and fullness is the first step to recognizing them again. The more you practice listening for and then following these cues, the better you’ll be at identifying your body’s specific needs, which is a stronger pathway to weight loss than dieting could ever hope to be.
2| Commit to getting plenty of quality sleep each night.
Sleep is the ultimate bodily need. When we’re sleeping, our bodies have a chance to relax, recover, and repair from a busy day. Getting enough sleep is linked to a ton of health benefits, and naturally, it also plays a role in weight management.
If you struggle to lose weight, a sustainable change you can make is to start getting enough sleep each night. A lack of quality sleep is directly associated with an increase in the hunger hormones ghrelin and pepsin. Because you didn’t get enough rest, your body is seeking energy stores from other sources. Since the human body also gets energy from food, it sees eating as a quick alternative to sleeping, so it increases your hunger hormones to get more fuel.
3| Drink plenty of water throughout the day.
Staying hydrated can help you lose weight. When your body isn’t well hydrated, it isn’t functioning at its best–this can lead to another cry for energy from those pesky hunger hormones.
Drinking plenty of water is also associated with improved digestion and appetite suppression. Sometimes, the body will send hunger signals when it actually needs hydration–if you’re feeling a light sense of hunger, reach for a glass of water first. If you still feel hungry after drinking the water, then eat your snack.
4| When you eat, make a point to really enjoy the entire experience.
Other countries such as France have national dishes that are often calorie-laden in dairy, carbohydrates, and oil. However, French citizens are some of the leanest in the world. If their daily diet staples are so high calorie, how do the French maintain such low average body weights?
The answer isn’t related to what they eat, but rather how they eat it. In France, eating is considered a full-body experience. Rather than wolfing down meals at their desks between emails or in front of the television, eating is considered a social, multi-sensory experience.
The French eat slowly, experience a variety of flavors and textures in their foods, and usually enjoy a meal with others. Because the French are attuned to everything about their mealtime–the flavors, the aromas, the atmosphere, the textures, and more–they take their time and enjoy the entire experience.
We can take a serious lesson from French dining culture. Rather than eating food quickly in a distracting environment, learn to examine and enjoy the sensations you feel from eating. Take note of the flavors, aromas, and textures.
Chew slowly and savor each bite of your meal for maximum satisfaction. You’ll notice that slowing down and enjoying your meals and snacks is more conducive to weight loss–not only will you enjoy eating, but you’ll be more present to hear those natural fullness cues, too.
5| Practice separating your emotions from eating.
Food is often a source of comfort. After a bad day at work, you might find yourself reaching for chips and sweets once you get home. When you’re feeling bored, you may find yourself wandering to the kitchen for a snack break.
If you’re feeling stressed out, you may seek food to calm yourself. All of these are examples of turning to food rather than dealing with the root cause of the emotions you’re experiencing.
The next time one of your emotional eating triggers rears its head, take a second to stop yourself before going to find something to eat. Ask yourself what’s causing the emotion. Was it an argument with a friend, a bad day at work, a sense of boredom?
Whatever it was, take a moment to consider what actually needs to be done to solve the problem. You’ll likely discover that eating isn’t going to truly solve your emotional dilemma. Instead, determine next steps toward solving the issue and addressing the emotions that don’t involve food.
6| Resist the urge to restrict or eliminate any categories of food from your diet.
If you are a lifetime repeat dieter, this tip may sound really scary. If you allow yourself to eat whatever you feel like, you may fear that you’ll go off the “deep end” and overindulge in whatever foods you decide to eat. However, this isn’t the case.
Dieting preaches the importance of following a set of rules to lose weight and achieve an ideal body, but we already know that dieting is neither effective nor long term sustainable. Restricting or eliminating whole categories of food is a recipe for the perfect binge storm.
Instead of cutting out or restricting categories of foods, allow yourself to have some of a previously “forbidden food.” When you teach your body that no foods are “off limits,” the urge to overeat or binge them disappears. You know that food is available to you when you feel like eating it, so the urge to get more of it disappears. If it isn’t forbidden, this means the taboo of eating too much of it is gone.
For example, consider Kayla. After years of trying a variety of diet programs, Kayla picked up a lot of rules and guidelines about how she “should” be eating from them all. One of her beliefs she gained from these programs is that eating bread would make her gain more weight, so she often restricted herself from eating any kinds of bread.
At a restaurant where free bread was brought to the table, Kayla felt an extreme temptation to eat some with her friends. Instead of eating some of the bread, Kayla finished an entire basket on her own and then felt really guilty afterward.
After the restaurant incident, Kayla decided she wanted to ditch the diet culture and actually enjoy foods like bread, so she began to reintroduce it back into her diet. She started by including some bread throughout her daily meals.
After a while, eating bread lost its taboo appeal–when her body learned that she’d have access to bread when she felt like eating some, the urge to overindulge in it disappeared. When she visited the restaurant again a few months later, she found that she didn’t actually care for the taste of the restaurant’s bread that much and preferred some other types she’d tried!
The Bottom Line
Dieting is a vicious cycle that often leads people who want to lose weight down an unsuccessful path. The true path to weight loss involves making sustainable, long term changes that are both reasonable and kind.
