How many ‘diets’ have you been on in your life? I have lost count. Truly. I have been on so many different diets.
Do they work? Yes, if you reduce your calories and don’t raise your insulin so much you will lose weight. It’s science.
Do they work? No.
I know I’m going to sound as if I am contradicting myself completely but all diets work and all diets don’t work.
A lot of people say they are fed up of diets and I was certainly in that camp before I started my weight loss journey my way.
I had done Slimming World, Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, Cambridge Diet, Ketogenic, Aktins, Lighter Life, Diet Chef, Dukan Diet, Mediterranean and Paleo to name a few. I’ve tried shakes, bars, meal replacements, pills, powders and slimming teas. I have done it all.
Did they work for me? I had some success with all of them and if I’d had carried on with them long term, I’d likely be a healthy body weight. But I just couldn’t stick with them.
What is a diet?
A diet is just a way of eating. Nothing more and nothing less.
One thing you should think about when following a particular diet is “Is this sustainable?”
Can you drink shakes 3 times a day for the rest of your life? Can you take a weight loss pill and eat cabbage soup all day?
If the diet you are following isn’t something you want to be doing for life then stay away from it.
However, the question of whether it is sustainable, has become a very interesting question because some don’t think of anything as sustainable if it doesn’t include eating whatever you want whenever you want.
If you want to keep a healthy body weight then it is not sustainable to be eating 5 bars of chocolate a day plus bread and pastries. We all know this.
The best diet
You want to make sure that any diet you're on is sustainable and one that you feel your best on.
For some, the best diet for them may be the Mediterranean diet. For others, a vegan diet. For me it was intermittent fasting and a significant reduction in flour and sugar.
Diet Mentality
Don’t treat a diet as a temporary measure for you to get the weight off. This is a big mistake.
We often talk about going on a diet and then coming off a diet. A ‘diet’ has become synonymous with losing weight. You go on a diet, you lose weight, and then you finish the diet. Then we complain that we gained all of our weight back!
The diet did work when you're on it, but you came off it. If you think of a diet as a temporary change it becomes a problem. If you think about your diet as something that you're going to go on, then it already has negative connotations. If you choose a diet which is sustainable it can become a lifestyle.
When you have a lifestyle change instead of a ‘diet’ then you can’t vilify the diet. The change in eating is something that will actually serve you and your body. It will serve you in becoming a lower body weight.
The diet mentality, whether you're on it or off it or blaming the diet, doesn’t really serve you.
Blame Game
One of the reasons why we don’t succeed in any diet is blame. We blame the diet, we blame lack of time, we blame family outings and we blame our local grocery store when they have their bakery products on show.
If we are blaming everything else in our lives we are not taking responsibility. This is completely disempowering and causes you to believe that you have little control over your actions.
For example, if the reason why you’re overweight is because diets don’t work, then the diet is the problem. When the diet is the problem you start to believe that no diets will work for you and you disempower yourself to lose the weight.
Many people have given up dieting because they believe dieting is bad and have decided just to accept themselves at the weight they are even though they're not happy at that weight.
Diets are neither good or bad. People will believe that diets cause them to feel upset or irritable or moody. Why would the diet cause these emotions?
When you go on a diet, a lot of times, depending on what kind of diet it is, you're restricting yourselves from overeating.
The number one reason why people overeat is because they don’t want to deal with their emotional life. Whether that be anxiety, stress, anger, boredom, happiness.
All a diet does is create that awareness. A diet removes the option of overeating and all those emotions are coming to the surface and there is no food to push those feelings away. It’s easy to blame the diet and say, “This diet is causing me to feel unhappy.”
The diet is often just revealing what's going on underneath. A lot of people have success losing weight in this way but it’s a ‘white-knuckle’ ride the whole way and these are the people who gain all the weight back, not because the diet wasn’t effective but because they had not dealt with the emotions they were trying to manage with food.
If you make the decision of blaming the diet, you miss the opportunity of understanding your emotions.
The reason why you don’t like the diet is because you couldn’t eat something every time you had a negative (or sometimes positive) emotion. When you acknowledge that you put yourself in a very different position. You can start to deal with your emotions.
Being overweight is often a symptom of your emotions. And a diet is really just a sticking plaster. You need to deal with the cause to stop the symptoms.
Is slow weight loss enough for you?
Another reason why people say a diet doesn’t work is when they aren’t losing weight fast enough. They want immediate results, especially when they are feeling miserable doing the diet.
But 1-2lbs a week every week for 6 months (24-48 lbs) is going to be so much more beneficial for you than 10lbs the first week and then a cycle of weight loss and gain for the next few months.
If it was just education it would be easy!
Sometimes, people are overweight because they don’t understand nutrition. Once they learn how to eat properly, they do it and the weight comes off. They learn how to eat and they change their lifestyle and they never put the weight back on. They don’t crave all the sugary treats and everything is great. Diet plans (not all) are great for people like that.
However, if you are anything like me, a diet plan just does not cut it! Most of us know that if you eat a loaf of bread and a family size chocolate bar you are likely to put on weight. That knowledge does not stop us. If you eat in an emotional way, a diet plan will never be enough to get the weight off and keep it off forever.
If you eat emotionally, then the diet will always be the enemy because it prevents you from using food to help your emotions and you will always be looking for that diet loophole.
For example, Slimming World has lots of ‘free foods’ ie foods that do not ‘count’ or Weight Watchers who have certain foods which are ‘no points’. People will use these foods to keep overeating so they don’t have to manage their emotions. They find ways overeating within the rules of the diet. At the end of the day a banana, regardless of whether this is free food will still have calories and still cause your insulin to rise.
The diet is not the problem but it’s just not addressing the reason why you are overweight in the first place. It’s not addressing the underlying reasons for the overeating.
Not Eating your Emotions.
Ok, so you have a diet plan that you know will be successful if you follow it.
Now you need to manage your emotions so you are not overeating to deal with them.
If you are not overeating what is left?
What emotions do you have to deal with?
What issues do you have in your life that you need to process and understand?
The initial reaction for most is to say ‘I don’t know’. And you won’t know until you have stopped overeating long enough to listen to yourself.
Let yourself experience the emotions. Then you can figure out why you are having that emotion.
That’s when you get to the coaching work.
That’s when you understand your brain and what you're thinking and what's going on in your life. You think your problem is a weight problem, but really, that is just a symptom of not understanding how to process your own emotions.