Why Diet & Exercise Don’t Work…

There’s so much guilt and shame wrapped around our food choices and body image. But, our food choices aren’t associated with our physiological needs, they’re associated with how we feel about them.

Look at coffee for instance… My wife is an avid coffee drinker and insists on having a cup before any conversation in the morning. And, after a couple of sips, she transforms into an instant morning person. I know that the 10mg of caffeine she consumes makes minimal impact on her physiology. Even 100 mg after a full cup of coffee has minimal effect for the avid coffee drinker, yet their mood is exponentially different if they don’t have a cup of coffee.

Food is the same as coffee. We’ve been rewarded with food, punished with food, socialize with food and have all felt that panic when we’re hungry.

Food is our biggest motivator.

This is why it’s nearly impossible to change your diet with food choices alone. The macro nutrients that our body needs is so different than what we actually consume, because our food choices are not based on the food itself, our food choices are based on our emotional relationship to what we eat.

When we are taking out a food that we love, our brain craves that food even more than our bodies do.

This leads me to the real question, are cravings psychological or physiological?

The true answer is both initially, but a recent study conducted with chocolate addicts shows that our cravings are more psychological than they are physiological. Abstaining from your preferred food has shown to cause more cravings of that food.

• *Polivy, Coleman & Herman conducted a study with chocolate addicts and concluded that the participants who gave up chocolate for 1 week showed higher cravings and more overeating at the end of the week. You would expect for the body to get used to not having chocolate, thus you wouldn’t crave it as much. This is not the case because our brain craves it more than our bodies want it.

If our food choices were based on our body being addicted, you would see those same cravings decrease when the body was used to abstaining. Study after study showed that mental health symptoms were highly correlated with food addictions.

When we see how interconnected mental health and food is, we can start to understand why diet and exercise alone does not work long-term.

Step 1 — You are the Answer:

We can’t just take bad food choices away and expect to loose weight. Study’s show that being deprived of the food you want actually increases your desire and overindulgence of it.

We need to change the mindset that controls your self-image. Meaning, that we need to create new thoughts, feelings and beliefs around who YOU are, and the body will follow.

If you were to take a homeless person, dress them in an expensive suit, would their life-style change? No. If you were to loose your desired amount of weight, would you be able to maintain it? Not without changing who YOU are first.

The way we think about ourselves controls our results. If your self-image never changes, nor will your results.

Step 2 — How to get what you want:

To build a body you are proud of, start by accepting where you’re at. We get what we focus on. If you focus on flaws, you’re going to find more.

The hardest part is accepting where we’re at, but it’s also the most important.

If you keep critiquing your body, you’re actually triggering destructive behaviour and bad habits.

When we reject our body, we are rejecting who we are and we are dismissing our value. You’ve got to go through the first phase of accepting your body as it is, to get to the second phase.

Step 3 — Gratitude

Jim Kwik posed this question in his book Limitless, “What if you woke up tomorrow with only things you were grateful for today.” If we don’t practice gratitude for our body, than we miss the point that we’re alive!

We miss part of our journey, when we’re disgusted by the vehicle we have to travel in. We treat the things we love better than the things we don’t like.

We often forget that our body is separate than who we are, and forget to be gracious for this gift…without it, we will die.

Allow yourself to be grateful for your stomach and how it made your baby. Choose to be grateful for your legs and the many places you’ve gone, some are not so lucky. Think of your wrinkles and the many lessons you had to learn to earn each line. When we honour our body as a separate entity, we can do better for it.

Step 4 — What’s the real goal?

Only when we value our body as a gift, can we start to make better choices for it.

Whatever your original goal for your body, we’re going to have to dig deeper to understand your long-term motivator instead of chasing after another short-term fix.

Trying another diet to loose the same 50 lbs is never going to work. Understanding why you want to loose the weight will bring you closer.

Only when we uncover the layers of why you want the goal, will you finally be able to reach it.

Maybe the 50 lbs initially feels like it’s for your partner so that you’ll want to have sex, but underneath that you remember how free and confident you were when you were younger, before having kids and you just want that freedom, lust and intimacy back with your spouse.

When you uncover what your goal is actually about, it’s not only easier to reach it, it’s a lot easier to maintain.

Maintaining your goal is easier when you know the real reason why you’re pursuing it instead of the other reason you’ve been convincing yourself of, like I need to loose weight because I’m fat, I don’t look good, I’m disgusting. These are all of the made up reasons covering up what you really want underneath it.

Step 5 — Be your goal rather than fight for it?

The most common way to achieve your body image goals is to diet and exercise, but most of the time it’s a short-term goal achieved with sheer grit and willpower.

I was training my clients and when I acknowledged how hard she was working, she responded “it’s all will”. I admire her and so many others that fight for their goals, but the journey is far more enjoyable to just Be.

Who are you with your goal achieved?

We’re so busy fighting to get something or go somewhere, that we never fully embrace the person who has it.

The problem with fighting for something, is that you’re never satisfied once you’ve reached it because the goal is outside of yourself, the goal never becomes who you are.

Only when we become the person who has achieved our goal, will we ever be in possession of it. This is a paradox. All of our lives we were taught to work for the goal, and only when we have it, we’d feel happy, proud, sexy, or confident.

But, if we don’t create that self-image of ourselves, we will always be in pursuit of something outside of ourselves.

Step 6 — Be YOU with your goal achieved

Bob Proctor always said “the purpose of a goal is to grow”.

We need to grow that version of ourselves who is in possession of that goal. Only when you have accepted your body, been grateful for it as a gift, can you become the person who achieves their goal.

Creating the self-image of who you are, will allow you to be in possession of what you want before you even see the results.

When you create yourself as a proud woman who has the courage to be heard, you take action and build habits around this identity. Likewise, if you create the image of a disgusting woman who has to loose weight to be seen, you will always be chasing another diet.

If you want to loose weight to feel confident, proud, or sexy, do one thing everyday that genuinely makes you feel like that. Being the person will not only make you feel better, you will also start to take actions that coincide with the new image of yourself as confident, proud or sexy.

Actions only become habits when they coincide with who we think we are.

If you hate your body, then you’re going to take action either hiding out or you may even have habits of binging alone. Our actions are fuelled by our perception of ourselves and our habits dictate our results.

You can’t out run the image you have of yourself.

Whatever you feel on the inside gets projected on the outside, whether it’s intentional or not.

Your self-image dictates your habits and your habits determine your results.

You can diet and exercise to loose weight, but until that image of yourself changes, you’ll always be chasing after a short-term win. If you want long-term results, become the person who has achieved their goal.

Starting right now, you can practice acceptance for your body and appreciate what your body is capable of, and only then can you build habits that support the beautiful person you are.

If this made a difference for you and you’re eager to get started, I would love to hear from you. Message me and I’ll send you free access to our Level Up Habits App that includes a comprehensive nutrition guideline, corrective exercise, and most importantly easy mindset journalling prompts that will help you create a version of yourself you can be proud of.

**Janet Polivy PhD,Julie Coleman BSc,C. Peter Herman PhD. The International Journal of Eating Disorders: The effect of deprivation on food cravings and eating behaviour in restrained and unrestrained eaters. 31 October 2005.