What you need to know about weight loss, dieting & the health and wellness industry
“Weight loss is an art first and a science second.
If it were purely a science, then we’d all be healed”
If this is a confusing area of life for you, don’t worry YOU ARE SO NOT ALONE. Even the health professionals often can’t seem to agree!
If you’re struggling to make sense of what diet you should be following in order to lose weight OR you’re frustrated because you think you lack discipline to follow through on your current diet or eating plan, then read on. This is for you!
I have been working in this area for nearly 25 years and I’ve seen so many eating plans, diets and ‘movements’ come into fashion and then go out again often just as fast. I’m always curious to see what will come up next. The language often changes – you get told that it’s not a diet; rather it’s a lifestyle or a wellness-eating plan.
One thing that doesn’t change however is that we almost always lose weight and then re-gain it, and then we lose it; only to re- gain it back again. Have you ever wondered what that’s about? So many of my wonderful clients beat themselves up, as they just can’t figure out the formula for success.
I wrote this blog just for you in order to try and clear up some of the crazy confusion so that you can make an informed decision about how you want to deal with this area of your life. That way you don’t have to keep spinning your wheels doing the same thing over and over again. Who’s got time for that?
Lets begin:
1. Exposing conventional diets and why they don’t work long term
This is the scenario that usually plays out, see if you can relate… you decide that you’re fed up with being overweight, you have something coming up in your calendar, and the scale is just not speaking kindly to you. So you make the decision ‘I need to lose weight’. Maybe that brings a feeling of relief and determination. Now you have to find a plan and this is where it can get confusing. Where do you start? Have you ever Googled ‘weight loss’? I just did and it came up with over 1 280 000 000 hits! That’s over a billion searches! How about ‘eating plans for weight loss’? Try 110 000 000 hits. That’s well into the millions.
No wonder this is such a confusing area. It’s become a collective societal issue, meaning there are more people struggling in this area than not. There’s a quote from the Eating Disorders Foundation that says ‘The dieting industry is the only industry in the world that makes over $500 billion dollars a year, yet has a 98% failure rate.’ That makes sense if you look at the fact that billions of people have searched ‘weight loss’ on Google and continue to do so.
So why is this?
What’s the problem with conventional dieting and why doesn’t it work?
I can tell you right now that it’s not your fault. That’s right… this is not a willpower or lack of self-discipline problem as so many of my clients first believe. The actual problem is threefold:
Firstly, most diets follow the ‘calories in, calories out’ philosophy which research has proven is incorrect. This means that when you diet, you almost always have to restrict food by having a calorie limit everyday that doesn’t respect your appetite or physical hunger. Can you see how this is a problem? Dieting encourages you to disregard body signals.
Go and research the ‘Minnesota Starvation Experiment’ to see first-hand how restricting calories messes with your mind and your body.
Dieting also causes a deprivation mentality and obsessive thinking about food. You know when you didn’t think about eating certain foods and then when you can’t have them they’re all you can think about? It messes with your head and your body. It can also lead to a ‘feast or famine’ mentality. You’re either an angel eating small amounts of all the ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ foods or you’re a little devil stuffing your face full of all the naughty, forbidden, ‘bad’ foods. Can you relate?
There is also a highly significant relationship between dieting, food restriction and overeating or even binging. The majority of people who are diagnosed with an eating disorder developed it after going on a diet, especially if they first started dieting in their teens.
Secondly, the body has a weight set point it likes to sit at.
It’s very generous with the upper limit but incredibly stingy with the lower limit. This means that after you’ve lost weight, especially if it’s a large amount over a relatively short period of time, the body will often do everything in its power to move you back up to your set point. This can obviously cause confusion and demotivation if you don’t understand what’s happening or how to deal with this.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, diets and weight loss eating plans DO NOT address the psychological and emotional side of eating.
They also don’t teach you how to deal with your thoughts. This is huge. I’ve seen so many people lose weight on ‘healthy’ eating plans only to gain all the weight back because they didn’t deal with this very important part. You have to learn how to deal with eating out of boredom, stress, sadness, frustration, irritation, anger or even happiness so that you don’t always reach for food when you feel these feelings.
Or at least have a choice whether you want to or not.
2. The rise of clean eating and the wellness industry
I climbed on this bandwagon in a big way when I decided I’d had enough of conventional diets having become seriously fed up with the insanity of constantly losing weight only to pick it up again. But here’s the thing, the wellness industry probably developed out of the need to do things differently and for people to really experience wellness BUT unfortunately the wires got seriously crossed and once again it became this almost virtuous way of losing weight whilst eating in a healthy and clean way.
Guilt also played a huge role as I noticed people beating themselves up for not taking better care of themselves. People would talk about letting themselves down. We started to become the food police – there were now good and bad foods, which made you a good or bad person.
The wellness movement also caused increased our fear as we were told that being fat or overweight meant impending dread diseases and an early death!
It made sense that we saw the rise of ‘Orthorexia nervosa’ – people who are so terrified that they’ll get sick and die if they eat the ‘wrong foods’, that they keep extremely tight control over what they do eat.
And are miserable.
Whilst there are many medical and health practitioners throwing their weight (no pun intended) behind this movement, often for very noble reasons and a genuine desire to help others, by preventing or reversing ‘lifestyle’ diseases, the danger lies in it becoming just another ‘weight loss diet’ cloaked in a wellness plan.
When this happens, then all the issues that come up for us in conventional dieting get triggered here in the same way – a sense of deprivation, and the body getting stressed AND emotional eating has still not been addressed.
3. The Health at Every Size (HAES) Movement
The HAES movement, which focuses on body positivity and size acceptance, has been a very necessary and welcome counter-weight (no pun intended!) to the craziness of conventional diets and weight loss.
HAES encourages people to focus on their health behaviours and not on weight loss. They also encourage intuitive eating believing that if you can learn how to listen to your body, it will guide you to what it actually needs. But they say, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that intuitive eating means restriction, i.e., fooling yourself into believing that you don’t need much food and therefore not eating enough.
Their aim is for you to forget about losing weight and enjoy living your life as it is right now. In fact, they also believe that it’s not the fat and being overweight that causes lifestyle diseases, it’s the stress of constantly being stigmatised and told to lose weight that can cause people to become sick.
Whilst I am in complete agreement that we need to feel free to live the lives we want right now rather than waiting till we have a better, thinner, more idealized self, I also think many people find this stance super challenging as they fear that with permission to eat they won’t stop. HAES says that you have to be willing to go through this in order to get to the stage where you know the food is available to you whenever you want so therefore you may not want it all the time.
Some HAES advocates can also become extremely vocal if you even mention weight loss. It’s like weight loss and dieting have become Siamese twins that can never be separated. I believe this doesn’t always need to be the case. In fact I’ve had clients lose weight and keep it off after a big identity shift – where they literally change how they see themselves and how they show up in the world. They also deal with their emotional eating.
So where does this leave you?
4. Eating Psychology – An exciting new perspective
Eating psychology looks at who you are as an entire person; who you are as an eater– your eating and dieting history, weight fluctuations, your relationship with food and your body image, as well as your habits and emotions.
We develop a unique plan that is entirely suited to you and your lifestyle. We look at what a healthy weight is for you – that place your body likes to be at when you’re eating nourishing, enjoyable foods, getting enough sleep, managing stress, and living life more on your terms, now, not later when you’re thinner.
Look out for my blog next week on 10 life-changing decisions that will help you stop struggling with dieting, food and your body image. We’ll be taking a deeper dive into some of the areas that will get you moving in the direction you want to go in: more food freedom, body love and acceptance, and a way of eating that works for you, moving you towards your body’s natural healthy weight.
Take action:
Based on the information I’ve shared with you and if you’re serious about wanting to change and heal this part of your life, I want to encourage you to start reflecting on and writing down your food, body and weight story – look at it from a physical, psychological & emotional perspective.
What does your relationship with food look like?
Does your weight fluctuate? If so, be curious and see if you can figure out why.
How did this weight come to be?
What diets have you tried?
What worked, what didn’t?
If you’re an emotional eater, be curious and reflect on what foods you eat when feeling certain feelings.
I can promise you that if you’re willing to set aside some time to really reflect and journal regularly, you will be one step closer to making changes that will lead you to ending the struggle with food, your emotions, weight and your body. Enjoy!
Body acceptance might literally feel like the most challenging thing you could ever imagine doing. AND yet, these are the vessels that contain the essence of who we are. All our love, hope, dreams, and desires are contained within this vital human suit. Without it we wouldn’t exist.