Diets don’t work
In fact, research shows us that dieters are more likely to gain weight in the long run compared to people who don’t diet, with some research indicating that dieting can even predict future weight gain!
Now whilst our focus at CHPTR isn’t weight loss itself (we focus on each individual finding their own balance, whatever that might be), diets are an important topic. Dieting can actually predispose people to emotional eating, cravings and overindulging, producing an ongoing cycle of restriction followed by overeating. This cycle makes people think they can’t trust themselves around food and that they need to follow another diet to ‘control’ their eating. This is the perfect storm for the diet industry which is why it’s worth more than £2bn a year in the UK alone.
You see, diets provide strict rules to follow which aren’t typically based on your hunger, energy, preferences or individuality. They don’t teach you how to eat when you’re not on the diet. Instead they provide a short-term solution, giving quick results but with long-term failure. More often than not there’s a fairly predictable diet cycle that looks something like this:
Decide to start a new diet (in a few days’ time, probably on a Monday).
Overindulge in favourite foods before starting the new diet (aka the last weekend of indulgence).
Start the rigid new diet, which often sees you eating foods you wouldn’t normally eat, or completely cutting out foods you enjoy.
Experience quick weight loss, which convinces you that the diet is good.
Real life happens (stress, lack of sleep etc. etc.) and following the rigid diet becomes haaard.
Find it too difficult to follow the rigid diet rules and eat ‘forbidden foods’ which can sometimes lead to a ‘free pass’ for the day….and maybe even week.
Quit the diet.
Start process again.
The rapid results seen in the early weeks of these diets often makes people think this is proof the diet works, with any ‘failure’ or difficulties being due to their inability to follow the diet fully or their lack of willpower. This leads people to blame themselves and go back again and again, trying to find another diet to try. The reality is however, that these early results are most likely down to lost water weight from what is essentially a crash diet, where people are consuming half their normal intake of food and a fraction of the carbohydrates they normally consume.
Dieting feeds dichotomous thinking about food such as there being good and bad foods, good and bad food days and a right and wrong way of eating. It takes people away from eating when they need to, and takes them closer to ignoring what their body is trying to tell them.
Diets make the promise that if you just cut out certain foods or eat in a certain way then you’ll lose weight. And you probably will. The argument here isn’t that the diet plans won’t produce results, initially they likely will; the argument is that diets are completely unsustainable for real life. Essentially diets work so long as real life doesn’t happen!
Now, I’m going to contradict myself here and say that diets do work for some people, but these people tend not to experience cravings, don’t eat when they feel stressed or bored and don’t eat because of unwanted emotions.
For individuals who eat because of cravings, or because they feel stressed, tired, upset, bored or for any other reason other than hunger, then a skills-based approach to eating is much more effective. This is because if you eat when you’re stress for example, following a diet that says you can only eat certain things at certain times doesn’t help you find new ways to cope with that stress. This means, the next time you feel stressed you’ve simply lost the one thing that you’ve previously used to help manage this feeling. A skills-based approach doesn’t do this, instead it looks for alternative ways to cope with the stress and how to best implement self-care in the future.
The CHPTR Online Coaching Programme helps you to explore how to get back in touch with your body, by learning how to hear and understand your hunger signals again. Each week, new eating skills practices are introduced to help you increase your confidence, build better eating habits and to find out what works for you! And to let you into a little secret, what works for me probably won’t work for you, and vice versa.
The process of reconnecting with your body and learning how to hear its signals again requires trust, honesty, vulnerability and curiosity. CHPTR Online Coaching is not about will power or cutting out food groups. There aren’t any ‘rules’ or meal plans to follow. Instead we provide principles and frameworks to use, explore and adapt for yourself and follow an approach called mindful decision making. It is not what you eat, but how you eat and why you eat that really counts.