Why Diets Don’t Work and What to do instead.
Have you ever “successfully” lost weight on a diet plan, only to regain the weight back? Do you wonder why the first diet you tried “worked” so well, but you just can’t seem to get the same results, if any at all?
If you’ve ever felt like a failure because you couldn’t stick to a diet, you’re not alone. In fact, research shows that 95% of dieters regain their lost weight within 1 – 5 years, with up to ⅔ of those dieters regaining even more weight than when they started.
So, what does this mean?
It means that this isn’t a matter of the vast majority just not having the willpower or discipline to lose weight and keep it off, it’s a matter of participating in a system that is set up to fail.
We often refer to the dieting industry as one of the biggest gas lighters out there, as it sells you a faulty product and then makes you think it’s your fault when it doesn’t work. As a coach who promotes Mindful Eating, I want to make sure you are well armed with the facts. Here I go into what a diet is, the research behind why diets don’t work long term, and 6 things to do instead.
I often hear these two questions come up time and time again:
Why do diets not work long term?
Despite what the dieting industry wants you to believe, humans are wired for
survival, including overcoming the effects of starvation.
2. Why am I not losing weight even though I exercise and diet?
Calories in vs. calories out isn’t the whole story when it comes to weight loss.
What is a diet?
A diet can be described in 3 ways:
1. The kind of food that a person or community habitually eats
2. A medically necessary diet that may be recommended and guided by a health professional (eg. A gluten free diet for celiac disease or avoiding a certain food due to an allergy)
3. Making the personal choice to intentionally restrict or manipulate one’s food intake with the sole intention of losing weight or preventing weight gain.
In this article, I will be referring to the third definition of a diet. While there are many fad diets on the market, a way of eating can be considered a diet if it includes some or all of these disordered eating behaviours:
Cutting out whole food groups
Ignoring/delaying hunger cues
Consistently eating less than your body needs
Fluid loading with water or coffee to stave off hunger
Compensating for eating with overexercising, fasting, or purging
Obsessive calorie counting
Eating according to a set of rules regarding when you can and
can’t eat, as opposed to listening to your own body
Why diets don’t work?
You may be wondering “but aren’t there crash diets that work? It worked for (insert someone you know), shouldn’t it work for me?” And this makes sense, considering the internet is riddled with convincing ‘before and after’ photos that make you buy into the weight loss fantasy. But let’s dive into the research.
Research shows that diets don’t work for the vast majority of dieters, regardless of if they stayed on the diet or not. A key study that highlights the unsustainability of intentional weight loss is seen in the Women’s Health Initiative, one of the largest and longest randomized controlled diet interventions. It followed 20,000 women between the ages of 50 and 79 who maintained a low fat, calorie restricted diet for the duration of 9 years. During this time, they were asked to keep track of their diet including how many servings of fruits, vegetables, grains and fats they had each day during the study. Initially in the first year of making dietary changes, the women lost weight. However, even though these women diligently maintained their diet and tracked their intake over the course of this study, over 9 years there was virtually no difference when compared to their starting weights.
Human beings are wired for survival
Humans have learned to adapt and survive instances of famine for millions of years. In terms of the ‘survival of the fittest,’ our ancestors who were able to pass on their genes were the ones whose biology had evolved to fight tooth and nail when the threat of starvation hit. As a result, we now see changes within the body that encourage weight regain after diet induced weight loss. These include changes to energy expenditure, metabolism, and hormones that are involved with appetite regulation, and can continue long after the initial weight loss period.
There are 3 biological changes that occur in response to dieting:
Neurological changes:
Dieters are more likely to notice food, especially tasty looking food, and food registers as more appetising, tempting, and rewarding. Interestingly, in one of her experiments, they found that when distracted, dieters consistently ate more than non-dieters. They also noted that distraction only seemed to increase the intake of the dieters, but not the non-dieters.
Hormonal changes:
In response to calorie restriction and weight loss, we see our leptin levels (our satiety hormone) along with hormones PYY, CCK, insulin and amylin drop – which poses a challenge as they all play a role in inhibiting food intake when we are in the fed state. Ghrelin (our hunger hormone), on the other hand, increases during calorie restriction. This means that we’re more likely to feel hungry and less likely to feel full given the same amount of food. So, you think it’s your lack of willpower, but it is actually your body protesting!!
Metabolic changes:
In efforts to keep us safe, our body slows down our metabolism and starts to use calories in the mostefficient way possible. While this is a good thing to help prevent us from starving to death, it directlyundermines one’s efforts to lose weight. In other words, as the body finds a way to run on fewercalories, there may be more calories leftover which may in turn be stored away as fat.
Why am I not losing weight even though I exercise and diet?
As we’ve seen in the sections above, the idea of weight loss as a matter of calories in vs calories out can beconsidered a major oversimplification of how our body regulates our metabolism. While it’s easy to lose weight in the short term, in the long term the body has compensatory mechanisms thatundermine its ability to maintain weight loss. Studies show that although exercising increases calories burned, the body will still try to maintain its set point weight, by increasing one’s appetite and manipulating its metabolism. Additionally, long term studies show that the vast majority of people are unable to maintain significant fat or weight loss by increasing their physical activity, even when they maintain their increased exercise routines. Ok so we don’t’ want to just be downers and leave you hanging but if this isn’t compelling evidence to let go of dieting, I don’t’ know what is…so what can you do instead?
6 Steps You Can Take Instead of Dieting
Practice mindfulness
Take a moment to pause and reflect on where these dieting beliefs came from. What food rules are you following and are they leading you closer to, or further away, from how you truly want to feel? Consider what tastes good, feels good, and what satisfies you. Building self-awareness around your eating habits is the first step towards lasting behaviour change and developing a healthy, feel good relationship with food!
2. Focus on health promoting behaviours
Try your best to put weight loss on the back burner for now, and focus on the behaviours that feel good, both physically and mentally. This includes letting go of dieting rules as a way to impose self-control and instead exploring healthy eating habits that feel good to you as a gentle way to nourish your mind, body, and spirit. Other behaviours include focusing on adequate sleep, stress management, social connection, and joyful movement.
3. Reconnect with your body’s wisdom
The longer we live in our heads and abide by external food rules, the further disconnected we become from our bodies. Connecting to how hunger and fullness actually feels to you can be a powerful tool to learning to trust yourself with food again. Using the Hunger Fullness Scale might be a great place to start.
4. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat all food
If you’re tired of Feeling Guilty After Eating, it’s time to give yourself permission to eat all foods. This may sound scary, but remember, it’s restriction that makes us feel out of control with food. Once we remove restrictions, we are able to remove guilt, and explore all of the many ways we can make food feel good.
5. Cultivate Body Respect
Body respect isn’t loving or even liking your body, but it’s treating your body with dignity and meeting its most basic needs: enough food, water, warmth, and rest.
6. Practice body acceptance
If you’re noticing big emotions coming up when you think about giving up the thin ideal or the weight loss fantasy, you might be grieving this idea that you have chased your whole life, body acceptance is worth exploring. Meredith Noble wrote the amazing article ‘Body Acceptance Begins with Grieving the Thin Ideal’ https://bit.ly/483WtbG. Here she describes how the body acceptance process can mirror the five stages of grief, with added advice on tangible steps for each phase. If this resonates with you, it may be helpful to process through this with a trusted therapist or health professional. If you can start accepting what your body for what it has done and can do for you, not just punish it for not looking the way you would like, it will be life changing.
In Sumary
No one knows your body better than you, however, I believe in order to move away from diet culture, we need to realise what habits we have that aren’t serving us, be more mindful of our relationship with food and if weight loss really is still a goal, find habits that will make it easier to stay in a calorie deficit. Not all calories are made equal, there are ways of eating that make it easier to stay on track by preventing hunger and cravings. Finding ways to stay accountable will help you, whether that’s with a health coach, personal accountablity or within a group that isn’t follwing a ‘diet’.