Can dieting help with weight loss?

You’ve just walked out of the doctor’s surgery with the words “lose some weight” ringing in your ears. They don’t tell us that we need lifestyle change, not a diet.

So, first we’re going to ditch the word “diet” as it implies adopting a temporary eating strategy in order to lose weight. It also psychologically sets us up for the idea of restricting food intake and not eating yummy things.

Whether it’s the cabbage soup diet which I remember from the late 70s, the Atkins, the Scarsdale, Keto, Carnivore or Weight Watchers, the grapefruit diet – in which we were told that this citrus contained an enzyme that “burnt off” more calories that it contained, it’s difficult to sustain weight loss on a regimented, calorie counting exercise that goes against the basic biology of humans.

What the doctors don’t tell us is that our food intake is part of an “eating pattern” and we need to change that in order to lose weight and become healthy.

Because, despite having a pretty much zero success rate, the concept of “going on a diet” remains to be the weight loss norm. We continue, as a nation, to get fatter and die from lifestyle diseases caused largely by obesity.

There are populations of people all around the world living to a ripe old age without fancy “diets” and the only thing they have in the common is a quality of the food in their lifelong eating patterns that are most important.

An eating pattern in which plants are predominant and where hyper-processed foods play a minimal role is a lifestyle change that becomes embedded in your everyday life. And it can happen at any time in your life – like now!

Every where around the world where researchers have found long lived people who have healthy lives they have noted the eating patterns feature a high intake of fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, grains and beans. These populations (called the Blue Zones) have more centenarians that anywhere else, and they’re hale and healthy. See www.bluezones.com

What they don’t eat is hyper-processed packaged foods and fast foods which are technologically advanced mixtures of food fragments and chemicals designed specifically to hijack our brains reward pathways.

Basically our brains are still primal – they haven’t yet evolved to make sure we’re eating food that optimises our ability to survive and reproduce. That’s one of the reasons that it’s hard to “diet”.

So what should we do to follow doctors’ advice? Find and develop an “eating pattern” that works for you body. And make sure it’s mostly plants.

The science says that psychologically, dietary restraint can lead to greater reactivity to food cues, increased cravings and disinhibition, and overeating and binge eating. Dieting can lead to unhealthy changes throughout our bodies, particularly when we restrict foods that are critical to the body function. An eating pattern is for life and it can help your life be a much better one.