How Can You Diet Better?
Diets appear to be a promising means of achieving a healthy lifestyle. Yet many of us struggle to diet. This presents the question of how can we better our diet.
Food is one of the being one of the basic necessities of our lives. It plays an integral part in our survival while also acting as a means for providing us with nutrients essential for growth and repair. Decades of scientific research have documented how the food we consume can impact our physical as well as mental health.
Given these benefits, we naturally tend to gravitate towards modifying our food habits and choices to improve our lifestyle, health or even attain our fitness goals. Finding a diet that can help us achieve these goals is not that difficult either. One search for “best diet for quick weight loss” is sure to provide us with thousands of results.
Despite the easy access to several diets on the internet, we often find it hard to stick to a diet. Have you ever wondered why that happens? And you are not alone either. Research from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that 65% of dieters lose all their progress and return to their pre-diet body within 3 years of dieting.
Given the failure rate, we must take a close look at dieting, a key aspect of leading a healthier lifestyle. Through this article, we will examine a few behaviours that we exhibit while on a diet which can result in its failure, following which we will explore a few ways through which we can make our diet better.
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Why Does Your Diet Fail?
Before we consider how to improve our diet, we need to examine why we find it difficult to stick to our existing one. Beyond the physiological and genetic explanations, we will concentrate on the thought patterns and behaviours that are typically displayed while on a diet that may be detrimental to adherence. These are :
1. Suppressing Food-Related Thoughts
One of the primary thought patterns is thought suppression. If you have been on a diet, you can recall the phases when you cannot stop thinking about certain foods such as chocolates, a slice of pizza or a pack of chips. We tend to counter this issue by suppressing these food-related thoughts altogether. We hope that by doing so, we no longer will think about the food products that can “derail” us from our diet.
While this may appear to be beneficial, research indicates that it can be quite counterproductive. Take for example the 2010 study by James Erksine and George Georgiou, in which few individuals were encouraged to suppress thoughts of eating chocolate. Participants reported increased cravings for chocolate throughout the suppression phase, according to the findings. Not only that but after this period, participants reported consuming more chocolate.
The study demonstrates that, while restricting our thoughts about fast food and sweets can help us stick to a diet, they can only reverse the progress we made while on our diets in the long term.
2. Using Black-And-White Thinking
Also known as “all-or-nothing thinking” this is another thought pattern that many of us are guilty of. To give you some context, this is a cognitive distortion that causes us to categorise people, actions, and objects into dichotomies such as either good or bad, with no room for any grey area.
If we look at this thinking in the context of dieting, it can manifest as evaluating foods as either healthy or unhealthy, good or bad or even demarking periods when you are on and off the diet.
To make things easier, let's look at how we use this reasoning during diets. Consider the last time you ate a scoop of ice cream or a candy bar and felt as if you had blown your diet. This feeling might prompt you to abandon dieting and any progress you have made.
Another scenario where we exhibit this thinking is when we try to indulge in our favourite fast food during the week before beginning a diet, during which we will abstain from these indulgences. Another illustration of this thinking is the practice of setting eating windows during the day and avoiding food once the window has passed.
From these scenarios, it is clear that it is very easy for us to slip into black-and-white thinking, but this too comes with its fair share of consequences. A 2015 study suggests that this thinking pattern can result in restrained eating which can go on to reverse all the progress we make while on the diet.
3. Make Errors When Setting Our Goals
Certain errors we make before a diet, when we set the goal, can jeopardise our ability to follow it. The first is the assumption that the path to our health and fitness goals will be linear.
In reality, this journey will be filled with several ups and downs. Every step forward will be followed by two steps back, but it's all part of the process. There will be periods of stagnation when we believe we are not making any progress, which can result in a loss of motivation and giving up on the goal entirely.
We also don’t tend to account for any life events when setting our goals, whether it be an injury or sickness. When we encounter these setbacks, we tend to spiral into believing that our progress has been derailed, ultimately giving up on the diet yet again.
4. Seeking Immediate Rewards
We live in a world that runs towards seeking immediate rewards. This tendency of ours can be better understood with the help of a concept from behavioural economics known as hyperbolic discounting. This suggests that we are more drawn towards rewards that we obtain in the short term as opposed to bigger rewards in the long term.
Let's take for example, you are 5 days into a diet plan and have to attend a birthday party. There you notice the delicious chocolate cake that everyone is raving about. At that moment your perception of the immediate pleasure derived from consuming the cake will outweigh the long-term benefit of better health which seems distant to you now. As a result, you might give in to the immediate reward which can affect your long-term progress.
How Can You Improve Your Diet?
Now that we have examined why we might not stick to diets that often, let us look at how we change that.
1. Be Realistic and Set Long-Term Goals
To better our chances of sticking to our diet, we need to acknowledge that a short-term focus towards our health and fitness might only yield short-term rewards.
Take for instance the fad diets we have come across all these years. Diets like juice fasting, cabbage soup diet or Whole30 promise quick weight reduction or rapid fat loss, by eliminating entire food groups such as carbohydrates or fats. We might even notice a difference because of a drop in water weight.
But the caveat to this is that these diets are not sustainable. We might find it difficult to continue keeping up with the strict dietary requirements while we are on the diet itself. Such detox diets can be extremely stress-inducing and have been shown to increase individuals' cortisol levels and increase their appetite as well. Consequently, making it difficult to lose weight which is accompanied by binge eating and weight gain.
The aforementioned evidence suggests that we should adopt a more long-term approach for lasting change. Creating realistic expectations can be helpful in this case. For instance, if you want to get washboard abs on a new diet in 3 weeks, in the initial stages you have greater motivation to reach your goal. But as time passes and we do not see any visible progress, we feel the urge to give up. Additionally, indulging in a snack that is not part of the diet in this period can make us view the diet as a failure due to the black-or-white thinking we mentioned earlier.
However, being realistic and flexible, in this case by understanding that it can take 9-12 weeks instead of 3 can make the process easier. Additionally, to counter our black-or-white thinking, we can create smaller goals in the process, for example, meeting your daily macronutrient targets. Accomplishing these goals will help us feel good about the progress we are making on our journey to better health.
2. Evaluate Your Dietary Preferences
When you are beginning to start on any diet, you need to understand if it is compatible with your current diet. This is because research suggests that your adherence to any diet you adopt is affected by how different it is from your usual diet. In other words, you would be able to stick to any diet if it is similar to what you currently eat.
For instance, a 2012 study showed that individuals whose natural diet was similar to the Mediterranean diet demonstrated higher adherence to it. On the other hand, a 2009 study by Frank Sacks and his colleagues showed that when individuals were on a diet that reflected the macronutrient composition of their usual consumption, they showed higher adherence. That is if the diet they were asked to consume contained similar quantities of carbohydrates, proteins and fats to their actual diet, individuals were able to follow it better.
These findings emphasise that we need to make sure that we tailor the diets we see online to match our preferences and habits. This is because if you are someone whose usual diet tends to lean towards being more carb-heavy, then you are going to find it quite difficult to follow an Atkins diet or keto diet which tends to consist of meals with lower carbs.
Instead, if you personalise it to include foods that you enjoy or are used to, you will be able to follow the diet. Additionally, whenever you try a new diet, try to ensure that your nutritious requirements are met. This can also contribute towards making a meaningful and sustainable change.
3. Maintain a Journal That Tracks Your Progress
Lastly, a simple yet effective method that can keep you on track to meet your dietary goals is by maintaining a food diary and logging in your progress. According to experts, this can be a very useful tool if you are working towards changing your eating behaviour. Not just that, but if you are keen on shedding a few kilos, then research indicates that people who maintain a food journal tend to be more successful in losing weight.
Aside from these benefits, a food journal or diary helps you keep track of your food consumption, making you more mindful and aware of your eating patterns, mood when eating, and the time of the day you feel hungry the most as well. Having this information will make it easy for you to make smaller changes to your eating habits to reach your goals.
But what do you include in your food journal?
You can start by including data about:
Specifics on what you are eating. You can even mention the method used to prepare the meal e.g. broil, steamed, fried.
Quantity of the meal. Estimate the portion of the meal in familiar measurements such as tablespoons, cups, and teaspoons to make an entry in the journal For more accurate measures, you may also use a weigh scale.
When you are eating it: whether it be a midnight snack or a post-lunch one, record the time you consume your meals
This is just a starting point. You can customize your food diary to match your individual needs and include aspects like your mood at the time of each meal, who you are eating with, and so on. You can keep track of your food intake on paper, in an Excel spreadsheet or with apps like MyFitnessPal. It doesn't matter where you keep track of it; just make sure your entries are accurate and consistent.
Dieting is not a one-size-fits-all approach like the fad diets on the internet might make it seem. The results of which are evident because, despite our best efforts, we find it difficult to stick to the diets. The key then is to understand that our focus should be on making a sustained change as opposed to going for quick fixes. By being consistent and flexible with our diet choices we will be able to reduce the number of lapses and achieve our goals effortlessly.
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