You spend the entirety of the diet paying attention to nothing but the rules, consciously overriding your body’s natural signals (Hey, I’m kind of hungry. Yeah, so, definitely hungry . . . REALLY FREAKIN’ HUNGRY OVER HERE.) to adhere to the plan and ignoring anything that might be suffering as a result. Like your energy, cravings, sleep, mood, relationship with food, or general likeability as rated by your significant other, best friend, and co-workers. You just step on that scale every morning crossing your fingers, your self-confidence hanging in the balance.
And yes, you lose weight—but let’s not celebrate just yet. The fact is, your metabolism is actually slower than it used to be, because the stress of the diet changed both your hormones (which regulate your blood sugar, body fat levels, and appetite), and how effectively you burn calories. You’re hungrier than you were before the diet, and your cravings are stronger than ever because you’ve been deprived of energy and forced to overdraw your willpower bank. For weeks now, you’ve been cranky, less motivated to exercise, and maybe, if truth be told, a little bit depressed . . . but hey, at least you’re skinnier! (Oh, but also softer, since crash diets tend to burn muscle mass as well as fat.) And once the diet is over, you’re left wondering, “Now what?”
But WAIT.
First, because you succeeded and lost weight, you deserve a treat, and surely you can afford to relax a little because you’ve been so good, right? And since you didn’t change your habits or learn how to comfort or treat yourself in a new way, you go right back to rewarding yourself with the unhealthy food your brain has been demanding . . . the same stuff that got you into trouble in the first place. The same stuff that made you gain weight before and will make you gain weight even faster now because your body sucks at burning calories and wants to replenish your fat stores fast, post-“starvation.”
And slowly but surely, you slide right back into your old habits and regain all the weight (and then some), feeling like a failure and eating even more to compensate for the stress, guilt, and shame. Essentially, your diet has left you heavier, sadder, and even less healthy than before.
Thanks for nothing, diet. Let’s not do that again.
Dieting: Just (Don’t) Do It
What do we all want out of a “diet?” Surprisingly, “weight loss” is no longer the most common answer. According to a November 2015 Gallup poll, the number of Americans who want to lose weight is on the decline, despite the increase in obesity rates seen over the last decade. Why the disconnect? With more than 1 in 3 U.S. adults in the “obese” category, perhaps your extra 20 pounds of fluff seems normal when you look around. Or maybe after doing fad diet upon fad diet without lasting results, you’re so demoralized that you’ve simply accepted where you are, afraid to try something new and fail yet again.
You know what I think?
I think it’s because you actually want more out of a diet than just weight loss, and the diet industry has its fingers in its ears, saying, “La la la la la.” It wants to sell books, powders, pills, and shakes, and the promise of fast and easy weight loss is the flashiest marketing technique. It banks on you feeling bad about yourself, because a lack of confidence ensures repeat customers. It’s uninterested in connecting with you as a person, unwilling to guide you through the examination of your emotional relationship with food and how that factors into your health goals. It takes for granted (because it’s convenient) that the only thing you care about is your body composition—that improving your energy, sleep quality, chronic pain, medical condition, and quality of life aren’t as important as how much you weigh.
That’s rude, and it’s assumptive. The diet industry is not giving you anywhere near enough credit.
You don’t want quick fixes that won’t last. You don’t want to lose the same 10 pounds over and over again. You don’t want to be a slave to the scale, allowing it to dictate your self-esteem or self-worth. And you’re tired of feeling like a failure when yet another diet doesn’t stick (leading you to eat even more junk food to make yourself feel better).
You want more.
You want to use a new diet as a springboard; a jump-start to healthy habits that will last a lifetime. You want more energy, more restful sleep, fewer cravings, better digestion, resolution of aches and pains, and happier checkups with your doctor. Would you be psyched if you also dropped a pant size or two? Absolutely. But that’s not all you want.
Ultimately, you want to end the program feeling in control of your food, able to use the tools you’ve learned to maintain that control long after the “diet” part is technically over. If you could only achieve that one thing—lasting food freedom—wouldn’t your other goals (improved health, better self-confidence, and yes, a trimmer waistline) be that much easier to achieve?
Unfortunately, every diet you’ve tried in the past has failed to bring you long-term results because they do everything you don’t want them to do, and very little of what you actually need. First, they offer only a temporary quick fix, promising you’ll lose weight fast without any plan to help you keep it off. As a result, the scale is your only metric for success, which discourages you from focusing on the other potentially life-changing benefits of improving your diet and making yourself healthier.
In addition, diets almost always depend on calorie restriction, which often requires counting, measuring, or tracking your food: a tedious, unsustainable practice. And because they often don’t delve into the why of the program, connecting with you intellectually and emotionally and providing you with internal motivation to stick with it, you’re forced to rely on sheer willpower to survive the program.
Willpower
Did you know that willpower is a finite resource? This means that, despite your diet’s encouragement to “buckle down” and “stay strong,” you will, at some point, run out. Lots of things tap our willpower bank, like biting your tongue when your boss says something stupid, ignoring the ping of a new e-mail, or resisting the candy on your co-worker’s desk. Willpower is highest in the morning, but quickly runs low throughout the day when you’re dieting, as you’re forced to resist the signals your body is sending you in favor of sticking to the plan. Is it any wonder that we tend to impulse shop, gamble, or binge-watch Netflix more when we’re on a diet? This may explain why, once the diet is over, you simply can’t resist the reward of sugary, fatty, salty treats: Your willpower has been gutted. The diet will tell you that it’s your fault you regained all that weight—but any plan that expects you to change emotional attachments and physiological responses like pleasure, reward, and habit through sheer willpower is doomed from the start.
Diets also don’t address your habits or your relationship with food, only your current intake. They don’t teach you how to reward yourself in different ways, how to untangle your emotional ties to food, how to build healthy food habits (or break existing bad habits), or how to change your tastes to favor fresh, nutritious food. In fact, most encourage pre-packaged meals, bars, shakes, or powders, all of which move you even further away from a healthy relationship with food.
Finally, most quick-fix diets offer little to no structured support, motivation, or accountability while you’re on the program—just a list of “Dos and Don’ts”—and no preparation for reentering the real world when the diet is over. But they’ll promise you this is the one that will work, and you’ll never have to diet ever again—as if once you lose 10 pounds, your tastes, dietary habits, and emotional relationship with food will be so completely transformed that you’ll never go back to the foods you’ve been eating for decades: the same highly rewarding, comforting, familiar foods that made you overweight and unhealthy in the first place.
It must be magic.
So if the first step toward food freedom isn’t a diet, what is it?
It’s called a reset.
Push the reset button with your health, habits, and relationship with food, wipe the slate clean, and create a new foundation on which to build the perfect balanced, sustainable, healthy diet for you.
Now, maybe that sounds a little intimidating. We can all figure out how to diet (cut calories; restrict carbs or fat; replace meals with pills, powders, or shakes) in an effort to lose some weight. But designing a true dietary reset, one that reconnects you with your body, frees you from overpowering cravings, puts you in control of the food you eat, and leaves you feeling better than you have in years (or maybe ever)?
Yeah, that’s hard.
Reset vs. Diet
How does a reset differ from a diet? First, a reset focuses on improving your overall health, not just on losing weight. Second, it encourages the formation of new habits, overwriting the old unhealthy habits that got you into trouble in the first place. Third, it helps you address and redefine your relationship with food, and find other ways to reward or comfort yourself and relieve stress. Finally, a true “reset” will change your physiology (your taste buds, blood sugar regulation, energy regulation, hormonal balance, digestion, and immune system) such that your new healthy habits are supported from the inside out.
