The Trouble With Diets

Our bodies were designed for survival. When you “end” a diet (famine), food becomes plentiful again. When the diet is finished, the body will react by storing every possible bit of calorie as fat to protect it from the next ‘famine’, and the cycle begins again. We need to break the traditional view of dieting and update our understanding of how our bodies work.

Full Transcription Below

Hey everyone and welcome back to the podcast! Today I want to talk about diets and dietING, and how they really mess with us.

They mess with our bodies and the mess with our minds… and the truth is, if you really want to lose weight and keep it off, you have to stop dieting. So let me explain why I’m saying this and what I mean by it.

The first thing I want to do is to define what I am talking about when I use the word diet.

If you look up the definition for diet, the noun, there are 2 definitions.

First: the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats.

Second: a special course of food to which one restricts oneself, either to lose weight or for medical reasons.

So I want to make clear that what I’m talking about here when I use the word diet is a restrictive eating plan designed to cause weight loss.

Oftentimes calorie intake goes very low and exercise output goes high in order to create a calorie deficit… and the idea is that the body is going to decide to use fat to make up the energy deficit and you’ll lose fat that way.

So what most people do is they go on a restrictive diet, and they are willing to endure all kinds of pain, hunger pangs in the middle of the night, exhaustion… they have to focus really hard and use lots of willpower… and if they’re lucky they’ll lose weight in the process.

Now I want to say from the beginning here, and I want to make it very, very clear. This is no way to lose fat permanently . It’s simply not going to work, and here’s why.

The first thing that happens is that we damage the body’s metabolic processes. Up until very recently in human history, we had to deal with periodic times where food was scarce. This still happens regularly in some parts of the world.

So we evolved as a human species to know exactly what to do when famine strikes. We do as little as possible, expend as little energy as possible, slow the whole metabolism down so as not to waste anything.

I talked on the last podcast about how I’d been dieting and I didn’t have a period for over a year. That was my body compensating for the low calorie intake. Having a baby would take way too much energy during a famine. My body knew it didn’t have the resources for that, so ovulation and periods stopped.

I discovered later that my thyroid gland stopped producing sufficient amounts of thyroid hormone too.

You might ask - hey Dr. Angela, you’re a doctor, how come you didn’t figure this out? And all I can say is that I got so obsessed with the dieting and the results I was getting that I didn’t care that I was exhausted, that I wasn’t having periods, that I was miserable in so many other ways.

Now, since our bodies were designed for survival, guess what they do when food becomes plentiful again? They store every possible bit of calories as fat, in order to protect from the next famine. And that’s exactly what happened to me. I talked in the last podcast about having done a figure contest… well, after the figure contest was over, I started eating more normal amounts of food again. I sure felt better, but let me tell you I gained weight very quickly. That is a normal response to a famine, and a normal response to a calorie-restrictive diet.

I think that programs like the Biggest Loser did a lot of damage to our collective psyche as well. These people exercised like crazy, did not eat nearly enough calories, dropped their basal metabolic rate like crazy and ended up gaining all their weight back. They did a study of the long term outcomes of season 8 contestants. This study was published in 2016, and they discovered that the contestant’s basal metabolic rates slowed significantly during weight loss, and then they kept slowing down even after they had lost all their weight. So I want you to get this. The basal metabolic rate, which is the number of calories that it takes just to run the functions of the body, slowed during weight loss. That’s somewhat expected. But what wasnt’ expected was that even after the weight loss stopped, the basal metabolic rate kept slowing down. For one of the contestants, it was a slow as 800 calories a day. That’s really really low. That’s the damage that these diets can do to our metabolism. We train our body to protect itself from the next famine and we slow our metabolic rates down and encourage our bodies to gain weight later. .

So turns out, if you need to GAIN weight, the best thing you can do to achieve this is to go on a calorie restrictive diet.

And how many of us just do this over and over again? Drop the calories to 1000, 1200 calories a day, get on the treadmill for an hour a day to burn calories off, and struggle our way to an impossible goal?

So one of the things that I always teach as a first step in my practice and in my membership, is to STOP this Craziness. JUST STOP IT! Stop dieting.

Here’s what you need to understand. A well nourished body releases fat. You can’t starve yourself into lasting thinness. You have to NOURISH yourself into lasting thinness.

I recommend that you find a body composition scale and figure out what your Basal metabolic rate is. I like the InBody scale, so you can go to InBody.com and there is a tab that says Locations and you can find one near you. The test will calculate your basal metabolic rate for you. Remember that your basal metabolic rate is the number of calories that it takes to keep you alive without any movement included. Never go below this number or you will put your body in a famine state and cause weight gain later.

OK so that’s just one of the ways that dieting messes with our bodies. What’s just as bad, if not worse, is how dieting messes with our minds.

So I’m remembering back to when I was in my residency training. A LONG TIME AGO!! The facility I was training at had an Optifast program. If you’ve never heard of Optifast let me clue you in. You drink special nutrient dense shakes 5 or 6 day depending on your calorie needs, and you got your blood drawn once a week because it’s very low calorie. It’s actually one of the VLCD - Very Low Calorie Diets. Once a week we’d have a support meeting for all those who were in the program and they’d weigh in, get their blood drawn, talk about how they were doing and pick up their next week’s worth of food.

I always found these meetings so interesting, especially when we got to the point where people had lost enough weight that it was time to start allowing them to have real food. They’d still do their shakes for morning and lunch, but now they had to figure out how to eat real food. And they were TERRIFIED. I mean, TERRIFIED. They were scared to death that once they started eating real food they wouldn’t be able to stop and they’d gain all their weight back.

Now I want to ask you, is this any way to lose weight?

So many people tell me about how they don’t like to eat during the day. They’re afraid that if they eat they’ll gain weight, That’s what these crazy diets have taught them. Eating food means I’ll gain weight. So they drink a sugary coffee beverage and snack on pretzels or candy all day, then come home starving at night, and run themselves through a drive through because they’re too hungry to imagine cooking dinner. This is really really common. Being afraid to eat is very common if you’ve grown up being brainwashed by the diet industry to think that eating is wrong.

Something else that happens for people who’ve spent years dieting is a weird relationship with exercise. Exercise becomes a sort of torture that you have to endure so you can eat more. Many of these diet programs will allow you to eat more if you burn calories with exercise. So it becomes a trade off. I can have that treat if I just get on the treadmill and work off those calories. This really messes with your thinking about the benefits of exercise. I mean, exercise done for the sake of exercise is amazing. Just getting out and taking a walk feels amazing. It feels powerful to lift weights or to run fast or to get on a spin bike and pedal hard. The endorphins are supreme. Exercise for the sake of exercise is soo good for your mental health. But you put exercise into a diet plan, and pair it with food…so that you’re exercising to burn calories for weight loss… you’re in for a world in which your mind is totally messed up and you hate to exercise and you associate it some sort of torturous payment for a dietary indiscretion. Not good.

Sometimes people will come into my office complaining saying “I’m working so hard and I’m not losing any weight” This is a sure sign that they’re in that diet mentality. When I ask what they’re doing, i discover that they’re on their treadmills 60-90 minutes a day trying to burn off calories. They think that this is the way to lose weight. And I have to remind them of what I learned in a YouTube video: weight loss happens in the kitchen. Fitness happens in the gym.

Think about how you feel when you’re on a diet. It’s restrictive. It’s painful. People have a tendency to really judge themselves harshly and critically if they slip up. So diets teach you to hate yourself. That’s very damaging. And not conducive to long term success.

I’ll read what one of my clients said about her weight loss journey.

“I had been dieting sinceI was 12, never feeling good enough the way I was, and resorting to days where Ijust starved myself-because at that age, it made sense that if you didn't eat, you didn't gain weight. Itried every diet out there, from eating cabbage soup, flushes,and Jenny Craig to Nutri-System and HGC shots. Sure, the weight came off with most of them, butI could never master keeping it off, because all of those approaches are what I now realize were quick fixes'. After each attempt, I gained back all the lost weight plus a little more. And the worst part for me was that everyone could see thatI was once again failing--there was no way to hide it.”

So I hope I’ve convinced you to never ever diet again - to really focus on learning how to nourish your body properly. Diets destroy your physical health but causing your body to drop it’s basal metabolic rate, and this continues even after the diet is over… so you will gain weight later. They also destroy your mental health, causing a lot of self critical thinking, exercise aversion and just a generally messed up relationship with food.

One of the things we do in my membership is to help people really identify their diet language, so they know when they unconsciously step into that old diet mentality, they can catch themselves before it goes on too long. This is a huge key to really shifting the way you think about weight loss.

If you want to learn more about how to ditch diets and lose weight for good, just head over to my website at journey beyond weight loss.com. I’ve got a free course there for you to download so you can get on the way to getting this under control for good!

Also, while you’re there at Journeybeyondweightloss.com, go to podcast episode 2 and leave me a comment and let me know your history with dieting. Let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll answer them!

That’s all for today, and I’ll talk to you next time!

Dr. Angela

This episode was produced and marketing by the Get Known Podcast Service