Diets are NOT the answer

‘The Lifetime Weight Loss Nutritional Plan’. Read that over again and notice the final two words of the sentence. I really want to emphasise the words ‘nutritional plan.’ Not the word diet.

A nutritional plan involves controlling what you eat and at what times you eat it. It does not fully restrict ‘bad’ foods rather it employs them in moderation. It involves eating from a wide variety of food groups and once the initial adjustments are made it is suitable for the long term.

A diet consists of a certain period of time whereby different types of foods are restricted. A diet is strict (at least it should be!), unpleasant and most importantly temporary. This means that the weight you lose while on the diet will also be temporary. In my adventures as a Personal Trainer I have come across virtually every diet you have heard of, and some you never knew existed. Yet not one of them have convinced me that diets are the best way to go.

There is a scientific reason as to why diets do not work. In ‘caveman’ times our ancestors would not have food aplenty, eating when they felt hungry and as much as they felt necessary. No, they would have to hunt their food and often they would go large amounts of time where there was simply no food available. The human body, being extremely adaptable, had its own way of dealing with this. Whatever food that was eaten would be stored as fatty tissue so that in times of hunger the human body could use fat as energy. Fat being a very rich source of energy this worked perfectly.

Now, translating this in to modern times where for the majority of us food is no more than a couple of steps away, think of a diet as when a caveman would go days without eating. The body goes into starvation mode. When this happens, fat is not burnt as the body wants to save this energy rich resource. Instead there is water loss as well as muscle wastage. The reason muscle (protein) is lost rather than fat is that the body wants to hold on to the most valuable resource (fat) and instead it drops a less valuable resource (that being muscle). So while the scales are showing progress, in actuality the amount of fat you have lost is likely to be minimal. With the loss of muscle your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate or the amount of calories you burn at rest) decreases. Your body starts slowing everything down in order to preserve precious energy. Eventually the caveman finds food or in your case you get fed up with feeling lousy on the diet. When you return to eating as normal the body requires less calories to fuel it so without knowing you return to what was normally just enough food to maintain your weight and BAM! suddenly you begin to gain weight! The body is smart and will learn from its experiences. It now knows that it may again experience times of restricted food intake and so it does something about it. Trying to avoid having to go through that again the body stores the majority of the food you eat as fat (the most rich energy source!) so that the next time around won’t be so tough.

This is the process that millions of people have and continue to follow. They feel fat so they decide to go on a diet. After being on a diet for a while they’ve had enough and return to their normal ways. With the body now requiring less food due to the loss of muscle, accompanied by the body’s survival mechanism of storing more fat, the dieter gains back the lost weight and then some. And so the cycle continues from the beginning.

Have you experienced this before? If you have then you know just how frustrating it can be. But there are ways to limit your body from storing fat, which leads me into the next topic.