How Dieting Messes with Your Life and Steals Your Motivation

Episode 40. This episode is all about why dieting does not work and how getting caught in the ineffective dieting cycle keeps us distracted from learning to take great care of ourselves and focusing on the things that matter. Topics Covered We talk about why dieting does not work and instead causes stress and often increases food obsession.Although many people assume that they are "failing the diet", many of their perceived "failures" (like binge eating) are 100% caused by dieting itself. But yet, we blame ourselves and start another diet or "eating plan" and keep the cycle going.Giving up dieting does not mean giving up any pursuit of your health. In fact, quite the opposite is usually true. Giving up dieting lets us see more clearly what matters and what we need to do logistically to improve our health, if that's what we choose. We just get to do it without all the diet-binge-shame BS. I talk about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and how 36 men that were "starved" (put on a 1570 per day diet and lost 25% of their weight) became obsessed and preoccupied with food, and lost all interest in other things like hobbies, sex, etc (Keys et al., 1950). I discuss some of what this can teach us about the biological impact of dieting.I talk about the research study looking at calorie restriction without food monitoring (with pre-packaged meals) and how that increased cortisol, suggesting that calorie restriction itself inherently causes stress (Tomiyama et al., 2011) which makes us more prone to weight gain. Learn More About How Dieting Fails Us Check out my blog post for a comprehensive overview of the ways diet fails us (called "How Dieting Fails Us: A Comprehensive Guide"). Self Control is a Limited Resource We only get so much willpower and self control in a given day. People with sustainable habits they feel good about are not fighting tooth and nail every single day to keep them up. If you find that you DO have to use significant energy and willpower on simply maintaining your habits, then chances are they aren't sustainable. And believe it or not, it IS possible to form practices that don't exhaust you. I wrote previously about how to use this knowledge in our favor and learn to make habit changes that can actually last over the long haul. Check out the post here: NEWSFLASH: No One Has Enough Willpower for Dieting. Dieting Messes with our Biology It isn't just in your head. Food is fuel, and we need enough of it to thrive. Our bodies fight incredibly hard to reject our dieting attempts, and much of the weight regain people experience is a result of this. Sadly, we still tend to blame ourselves for weight regain because the scientific explanation is not often talked about. There is solid research on the biological changes that occur after weight loss, and it does not bode well for the diet industry. If this doesn't convince you that diets are failing us, and not the other way around, I don't know what will. Check it out here: How Dieting Messes with Our Biology. Dieting Erodes the Very Things that Are Essential for Long-Term Change We know from decades of research on motivation that we all need three psychological needs met to promote behavior change over the long-term: Competence RelatednessAutonomy Without these needs being met, sustained change in any important area of your life is unlikely. Dieting usually diminishes all three. More on this here. Defining the "Diet Mentality" An attempt to control your weight as the ultimate goal.The mindsets involved in a weight loss attempt that comes from a place of external "should-based motivation".Often coming from a place of "I'm not ok" as I am now. Typically this is the message we get from the diet and weight loss industry. "I'm not ok, but I could feel SO great and confident about myself if I just lost weight!"It comes along with an assumption that whatever program or plan you are taking part in knows wh...