Why you shouldn’t go ON a diet
Going ‘on a diet’ soon?
Just take a second to think about that statement and what message you’ve just sent yourself subconsciously
Going ON implies you’ll eventually be coming OFF.
What happens then? Will you be returning to how you ate before — to ‘normal eating’?
How long before you’re back ON a diet again because the normal eating piles all the weight back on again?
This isn’t meant to be one of those smug lecturing posts that are all over social media telling you how rubbish you are for not knowing about nutrition. That’s really not my style as I haven’t got a clue about fixing cars so how would I feel if a mechanic talked down to me when I take my truck in for a repair and I didn’t know how to change the oil?
I see so many of those from nutritionists really struggling to get clients and they think the shock approach works in addition to this. So they talk about all the woes of eating badly and how it affects your waistline.
I think people are generally not that stupid that they don’t know that eating lots of food may make them fat.
When was the last time the shock approach worked for you? People still smoke despite pictures of horrible lung diseases on cigarette packets so that’s probably not going to work when talking about low calorie donut swaps. People are still going to eat badly and then moan about gaining weight. It’s sort of a running joke to say about how your ‘diet starts Monday’ when posting a pic of your huge Sunday roast.
This sort of thing is even used as a ‘reward’ for coming to the end of a diet you’ve been on. I’m 100% guilty of this when I used to finish a bodybuilding diet and literally 5 minutes after stepping off stage I’d be neck deep in my ‘naughty’ bag of Lion bars and donuts.
Why do people do this?
Why after putting themselves through hell for 6–8 weeks on the latest roasted bland veg diet do they then undo all the hard work and effort by having a huge pig out?
Because they’ve missed the food they like
No way around it, if I ate donuts every day then I probably wouldn’t crave donuts every day
But tell me I can’t have a donut and even if I’ve just eaten one I immediately want another
Our brains don’t handle restriction well. Probably linked back in some way to our hunter gatherer roots but if you put a cow in front of a caveman and told him not to eat it or he could only eat it on red days then it’s probably going to get a little red very quickly in that area and on his club
So what’s the answer? We can’t eat donuts every day because we’d get fat, obviously. Well maybe not if you ate within your calorie allowance for the day, however it rarely stops at just one donut. The million pound heaven that is my local Krispy Kremes is a testament to that. Do you know they actually have a 24/7 drive through at KK so if you have a donut emergency you can solve it very easily…..
BRB
Back
To really create long term change in your composition and reduce body fat you will need to find a way of eating foods that you like but in the amounts that fit your calorie limits for the week. So it you really do need a donut a day you’ll need to allocate that in but in the knowledge that it fits into your schedule.
Most disordered or impulse eating can be controlled with an allocation technique. Your impulsive brain is 5 times stronger than your human rational brain so if you REALLY want a donut then it’s hard to resist it totally and say no. However you can control and work with your impulsive brain and keep it placated by having an internal conversation or even a spoken one and say
“we will have that later at xxx event/time’ but for now let’s do this”
Of course it may be best to check no one’s watching before you do this as talking to yourself can lead to the men in white coats being called. However in this day and age everyone’s either on bluetooth or updating their stories walking along the road so you’ll probably fit right in.
However you do it, it’s important to keep the most favourite foods in your life included in your diet to some degree and build new habits around them rather than to totally eliminate them, at least in the short term.
I no longer really eat Choc Hobnobs but there was a time that I really wanted them every day. However my progress through my healthier eating transformation means I now like a good side salad and some fruit. I actually do like the taste of raw spinach now as well. Although Kale can still do one.
Nasty crinkly yuk leaf.
The one thing that is possibly the exception to this is trigger foods.
These are the ones that once you eat them it sets you off down the road of bingeing.
I had a previous client whose trigger food was breakfast cereal and even one spoon would mean the whole box. We removed this 100% from her diet until she was happy that her knowledge of nutrition was such that she was comfortable knowing how much cereal she could eat to keep within her limits.
Her issue was not so much the cereal but the not knowing, the cereal enhanced this as she was unsure of the calories and also had a view of carbs that they meant fat gain for definite. So cereal meant she would get fat and so she just carried on as she’d messed up the diet anyway. Knowing how much to eat without messing up the diet was key.
So rather than going ‘ON’ a diet
Instead look to adjust your current eating so that meals and portions fit into your daily calorie intake.
Avoid trigger foods until you are sure that you can control them with knowledge, if that never is the case then so be it, find another snack that delivers the same sensation (crunch, variance of texture, chocolate etc) but without the trigger eg I can eat a bourbon biscuit and not eat another but hob nobs, that whole packet is gone in 2 seconds.
Adjust your habits to recognise eating or snacking traps in your day and adjust your routes and behaviour accordingly. I had a client who would always make the kitchen her first stop when she got home and that resulted in snack attacks.
We changed her ‘getting home habit’ so that she instead went to the bedroom first to drop off her work kit and then she would enter the kitchen in which we’d removed visible snack items such as the snack bowl on the side and replaced with fruit. Plus there was always a ready meal in the fridge to prevent snacking while cooking.
There’s lots of factors here to consider
But never think about going ON a diet. You’ll never put in place the lifestyle changes that you need to succeed in the long term and just end up rebounding massively.
For more help with dieting and constructing your own diet please go to
Lean Body Blueprint | BKM Nutrition where you can download my free guide
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