7 Reasons You Mess Up Your Diet
To get it right you need to understand why it goes wrong
When it comes to weight loss and changing your body it’s your diet, not your training that makes the biggest difference.
Sure, regular strength training helps with muscle maintenance but if you’re not in a calorie deficit then it’s not going to matter.
The truth about weight loss is if you’re not in a calorie deficit you won’t lose weight.
No ifs, buts or maybes.
This is the way it is, which means if you can’t stick to your diet you’re going to find it impossible to lose weight.
Now, I wish at this point I could tell you the one thing you need to avoid if you want to stick to your diet successfully, but I can’t and it’s because messing up your diet is down to a combination of factors.
In this article, we’re going to look in detail at the most common reasons you mess up your diet to help you stay on track no matter what life throws at you.
This will help you stop a small, unintended calorie surplus becoming an all-out binge, where you find yourself 5 episodes deep into the latest Netflix series, wearing your comfy clothes with a slice of pizza in one hand and the TV remote in the other.
All the while thinking “why the f*ck does this keep happening?”
Today you’ll get your answer.
Why You Mess Up Your Diet
As we’ve been talking about there are numerous reasons you might mess up your diet and these reasons combine to create a perfect storm of not giving a shit where you stop caring long enough to mess it all up.
The idea here is to make you aware of these factors so you can begin to recognise why you mess up your diet.
#1: Tiredness
I know it’s not secret than a lack of sleep can make you feel moody, unable to make rational decisions and generally like crap, but it’s also making you hungrier.
This means tiredness is a huge factor in why your diet goes down the drain after a bad nights sleep or worse a week of sleeping badly.
It happens because of two hormones, Leptin and Ghrelin, that work to regulate hunger.
- Leptin makes you feel full after meals (1)
- Ghrelin makes you feel hungry when you haven’t eaten
Normally, this is fine and these 2 hormones do their job of making you hungry when you haven’t eaten and full when you have eaten.
However, when you don’t get enough sleep your Leptin levels drop and your Ghrelin levels increase which means you not only feel hungrier but you also feel less satisfied after meals. (2)
This leads to the familiar routine of staying up way later than you should for no particular reason only to wake up the next day feeling lethargic and half-asleep.
As a result, of your lack of sleep, your ability to make decisions is reduced (3) which has a knock-on effect on your food choices, making it more likely you go out to eat, order food in and generally stray from the plan.
The bottom line? Tiredness is real, get your shit together and get enough sleep. It’s important for life, health and for changing your body.
#2: Shopping When You’re Hungry
We won’t even get into the fact that a lot of people who claim to be on a diet or want to lose weight don’t even shop and cook their own food, instead opting to get takeaways and wing it.
If that’s you, then you need to get your sh*t together (sorry but someone has to tell you) and make your fitness a priority, not an afterthought.
However, if you do go food shopping weekly then you’re going to want to avoid doing it hungry to have any chance of only buying what you need.
Why?
It comes back to Leptin and Ghrelin, particularly Ghrelin which is responsible for stimulating hunger. (4) This is because Ghrelin has this funny effect of making you more interested in and more willing to buy food items.
This effect was documented in a 2011 study that split participants into 2 groups;
- One group was injected with ghrelin to simulate a hunger state
- The other group was injected with a saline solution which had no effect on hunger
Both groups were then let loose to bid (eBay style) on edible and non-edible items. Whilst the participants were doing this the researchers observed their brains using a fancy fMRI machine.
Researchers found that participants given the ghrelin were not only willing to pay more for food items that the other group but were also less interested in the non-edible items.
This means that you have a tendency to make poor food decisions when you’re hungry which can easily lead to buying stuff you shouldn’t and then overeating said stuff when you get home.
Not conducive to stick to your diet.
My advice? Eat before you go shopping and make sure you go there knowing what you want to be.
#3: Alcohol
Alcohol can be included in the diet in moderation, but this requires you to do away with the binge drinking mindset and exercise some self-control.
It has 7 calories per gram, which means if you drink a lot or often then the calories will add up and you’ll mess up your diet for obvious calorie related reasons.
However, it also means that if you drink responsibly and account for these calories in your diet then you can absolutely have a couple of drinks without screwing things up.
However, alcohol also has a more insidious way of taking you off track.
You see researchers looking at the effect of alcohol and weight change found that it was your tendency to eat more when under the influence of alcohol that leads to weight gain. Not necessarily the alcohol itself, although drink choice did play a role. (5, 6)
When you think about it, this makes sense as decision making isn’t exactly in tip-top shape when you’re under the influence and these poor food decisions can easily lead you to eat way over your calorie allowance.
#4: Stress
Stress is universal and so are the 2 most common reactions;
- If you’re like me, you double down on the things you can control
- If you’re like my wife, you eat everything in sight
You’re probably like my wife…most people are.
I admit I’m probably an outlier. When I get stressed, I control what I can…my diet, my fitness, my routines. My wife, on the other hand, becomes an eating machine.
It doesn’t matter what I say or do, if she’s stressed, she will find the food and eat it, but why is this?
Well, the answer lies in the results of a fascinating study that looked at the behaviour of criminal judges (7) and which factors played a role in determining whether a judge would grant parole.
Ready for the fascinating part?
The study’s researchers looked at more than 1,000 rulings over a 10 month period and found that one of the biggest influences on a judge’s decision is the time of day.
They found that judges were most likely to rule favourably first thing in the morning with the likelihood of a favourable ruling steadily declining as the day passed.
The same thing would then happen after the judge’s lunch break, but why was this happening? In a nutshell…decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is the term to describe the phenomenon of how the more decisions you make, the more difficult it gets to make them.
The more complex the decision, the greater the effect.
For the judge, this meant every case he presided over added to the stress and fatigue.
Until finally, it became too much and he got to a point where he no longer had the energy to engage the necessary brainpower to make an informed decision.
Why relevance does it have to you?
Well, this same thing is playing out every day in your own life. Sure, you might not be deciding someone else’s future but you’re still making hundreds if not thousands of decisions daily.
These decisions are made more or less difficult by the constant pressures of your professional and private life until you too seek the path of least resistance.
At which point, working out or cooking your meals become a step too far.
Hard is out and easy is in. Which means high-calorie junk food is in and before you know it your diet is well and truly messed up. (8)
It’s no wonder that after a stressful day everything goes out the window.
#5: Restrictive Dieting
The idea that if you want to succeed you cannot enjoy your diet suffocates the fitness industry like a toxic cloud.
Worse yet, the more restrictive your diet becomes the harder it gets to stick to it. The truth is, restrictive diets are horrible. They’re un-enjoyable, unmanageable and unsustainable.
Add to this, everyday occurrences like tiredness, stress and the effect of alcohol and there’s no way in hell you’ll ever stick to your diet if it’s restrictive.
“But Theo, I see huge ripped bodybuilders do this all the time.”
Are you a bodybuilder, do you want to be a bodybuilder? No?!… I thought as much. So, why are you trying to train and eat like one? You need to be eating in a way that supports your goals, not someone else’s.
As for what counts as a restrictive diet, let me clue you in.
- Any diet that you need to take a break from*
- Any diet that restricts a food item or group without good reason
- Any diet you don’t enjoy following for the most part (no diet is 100%)
- Any diet that stops you from eating foods you like
- Any diet that doesn’t allow you to eat out without messing up your calories or binge eating
*if you need a break from your diet then you’re doing it wrong.
In the end, not using a restrictive diet comes down to 2 things for me.
- If you don’t enjoy the process of changing your body, then what’s the point
- There are enough other potential barriers to your success, your diet doesn’t need to be one of them
#6: Estimating Calories
Would you estimate your finances when trying to save money?
So, why would you do it with your calories when you’re trying to lose weight?
It’s nonsensical and it’s setting you up for failure, largely because everyone is crap at estimating calories.
Research shows that you might be slightly better at estimating your calorie intake if you’re trying to change your body (presumably because you have a better understanding of food and nutrition, and care more) but overall everyone struggles to get it right.
In fact, researchers found that people often underestimate the calorie content of their meals by up to 25%. (9, 10)
Combine this with what happens when you also try and estimate your calories burnt through exercise and it gets worse, a lot worse.
Researchers found that individuals overestimate the total number of calories burnt through exercise by as much as 72%. (11)
This is huge but it doesn’t end here.
Research also shows that (12); “normal weight individuals overestimate EE [energy expenditure] during exercise by 3–4 folds [and], when asked to precisely compensate for exercise EE with food intake, the resulting energy intake is still 2 to 3 folds greater than the measured EE of exercise.”
This means you;
- You overestimate calories burnt through exercise by 3–4x.
- You then overeat to replace these calories by 2–3x.
Here’s how this might look if you were to do a 30-minute circuit class…
- You burn 200 calories doing your class
- But you think you’ve burnt 600–800 calories
- In response, you eat 400–600 calories
- You end up overeating by 200–400 calories
- But you think you’ve undereaten by 400–600 calories
Before you know it, you’re no longer losing weight and you’re not even sure why.
If you want to stay on track and reach your goals, then you need to count your calories.
#7: Boredom
How many times have you found yourself mindlessly eating, only for some to tell you “you’re only eating because you’re bored”?
Turns out there’s truth in the statement, with research showing that you eat when you’re bored to solve the issue of boredom.
This means that boredom in itself doesn’t make you feel hungry but that you eat to stop feeling bored.
A look at the current research suggests 2 reasons for this behaviour.
- It feels good
- It breaks the monotony
Now, the reason it feels good is because of Dopamine, a chemical in the brain responsible for reward-motivated behaviour and the great feeling you have after exercise.
What’s interesting is that eating, particularly foods high in sugar, fat and sodium, also stimulates dopamine with research showing that because of this;
- Feeling bored leads to a greater increase in calories consumed when compared to not being bored. (13)
- Boredom “markedly increased food consumption” in bored participants when compared to non-bored participants. (14)
So, what about breaking the monotony, well this is where things get super interesting.
A study (15) looked to test whether boredom led to eating and if it did, was it to experience reward stimulation (i.e. the effects of dopamine) or was it simply to escape the boredom.
Here’s the interesting bit…
The researchers suggested that if people really do eat to escape boredom and not to feel good or because they’re hungry, could they replace the eating with self-administered pain as a way to escape the boredom.
To test this idea they performed 2 experiments;
- Experiment 1 looked at whether boredom would increase the participant's consumption of chocolate
- Experiment 2 looked at whether boredom would increase the chances participants would self-administer an electric shock
All participants attended 2 sessions.
- One session consisted of a one-hour documentary and was called the ‘neutral condition’.
- The second session consisted of a single clip from the documentary on repeat for one hour, this was ‘boring condition’.
The study found that participants not only ate more chocolate when bored but they also “more readily self-administered electrical shocks when bored”.
What?!
People actually gave themselves electric shocks just because they were bored. Humans really are fascinating.
At the end of the study, researchers concluded that “eating when bored is not driven by an increased desire for satisfying incentive stimulation, but mainly by the drive to escape monotony.”
So, what’s the answer, do we eat to stop being bored or to feel good?
Well, science says both and to be honest, aren’t they kind of the same thing. You’re still breaking the monotony of boredom whether it’s eating for a distraction or to feel good.
Besides, I don’t know about you but I don’t have the facility to give myself electric shocks when I’m feeling bored, but I do have the ability to eat.
So perhaps for most people eating the is equivalent of giving yourself an electric shock?! Either way, I think you will agree that being bored increases the chances of you eating and in turn messing up your diet.
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