Our diet culture is making us fat.
Yes, repeated diet efforts over the course of your life can put you at risk to be even heavier than you were when you started your first diet, and fad diets are at an all-time high.
We as a society are always dieting or NOT dieting.Restricting or eating like YOLOOn or off, all in or not! You get the idea.
Where is the recovery? Where is the periodization? Where is the sustainability!?
For the vast majority of Americans, the above concepts are foreign and don’t exist. They may even be a difficult concept to understand. We are constantly bombarded with new fad diets and shown flashy before and afters to convince us THIS is the diet for me. THIS is the diet that will change my life and give me lasting results.
True Life: Your diet doesn’t need a name. You need to eat more right now. Your body is mildly sick of your bullshit.
How are diet efforts making us fat?
Over 30% of people who try a new diet with success will gain the weight back and then some. THIRTY freaking percent.
Each time you diet, you are now susceptible to gain back even more weight. Your body is now primed to do this based on defenses it has put in place while you were restricting calories.
If you understand one thing from this blog make it this. Your body has evolved over time to survive, and the calorie deficit created during your diet is recognized as a stress/famine. Your body enacts its self-defense system, or down regulation of its processes in order to survive on what you give it. Your body only cares about surviving.As a result of dieting all four factors of your total daily calorie expenditure will drop:BMR (basil metabolic rate)NEAT (non-exercise activity)Exercise activity (calories burned while working out)Thermic effect of feeding
Your hormone functions have also now changed. Including decreases in your satiety hormones and increases in the hunger hormone and stress hormone.
Simply put you are now burning less daily calories than when you started. You have also “taught” your body to protect itself against future calorie deficit and fat loss efforts. What happens when we return to the standard American diet post calorie deficit is a recipe for disaster. Including regain of starting weight PLUS more. You have primed your body to gain new fat cells at a faster rate basically. (Keep in mind you never lose fat cells in a diet they just shrink, you can grow new fat cells post diet and we can never lose that new growth only shrink)
This is not to shame dieting, the vast majority of clients who come to me have weight loss goals. We all have the right to want to be healthier, fitter, leaner. You do not however just have the right to diet without preparation.
I just spent 12 weeks in a calorie deficit, prior to that I spent 4 months tracking and eating at maintenance calories. Now post diet, I will start a reverse diet to recover from the deficit and allow my body to slowly return to its true maintenance in a slow and controlled manner. This in its simplest form is periodization. Prepare, diet, recover.
We as a society need less dieting, more recovery, more time at maintenance, more time allowing our body to feel safe, more time working on our health to better prepare our body for fat loss endeavors.
Without recovery and a healthy starting point any future diet attempts will likely be unsuccessful and could very well result in even more fat gain in the future.
Does your diet have an entry and exit plan?
Need help creating one? Please reach out.