Why dieting normally doesn’t work……..

Why is it so difficult?

As its Mindful Eating Month lets see how practicing Mindful Eating may change our attitude to food and diets.

We think it can be incredibly difficult to lose the weight, but in reality the most difficult part seems to be keeping it off.  So when we lose weight we feel great, but when we put it back on we blame ourselves. I would say that I have been on some sort of diet or healthy eating drive for the past 25 years. No matter what Ive tried the weight always creeps back on. So can Mindful Eating help us to finally find a happy place?

I decided to look at why its so hard and how practicing Mindful Eating can actually help. Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist, says that “what most people don’t realise is that hunger and energy are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. Your brain does a lot of work behind the scenes and this is a good thing, because our conscious mind gets easily distracted. Its good that you don’t forget to breathe…or you get up to walk and don’t know how.”.

Check out Sandra’s TED talk here where she goes into the Neuroscience in depth.

Eaters can be classified into two groups:

1. Intuitive eaters – those that rely on bodily cues to tell them they are hungry. Interestingly intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight and spend less time thinking about food.
2. Controlled eaters – are more vulnerable to advertising, or that big bit of cake in the cafe, and a small square of chocolate is more likely to lead to controlled eaters eating the whole bar.

Sandra Aamodt talks at length about the vulnerabilites faced in childhood of dieting and bingeing, particulary girls in their early teenage years. There are several long term studies which show that girls who diet in their early teenage years, are three times more likely to become overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight. All of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders (Aamodt 2013)

Diets don’t have much relability…

Diets don’t have very much reliability. Did you know?…..Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight, 40% of them have gained even more. So therefore the typical outcome of dieting is that you’re more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it.

If dieting is a problem then what can help? Well Mindfulness can…..

Mindful eating can help you to understand your body’s signals so that you eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. Because weight gain really just boils down to eating when you’re not hungry. 

How do you do it? 

1. Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. 
2. Sit down to regular meals without distractions.
3. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done. I found this the hardest to do as you are retraining your mind, but it is worth it.
4. Slow down – take time when you sit down to take a few breaths, by doing this you will begin to eat in a less stressed way. You will then enjoy your food, by producing less cortisol your parasympathetic nervous system will aid digestion and absorption of your food.
5.   Let’s face it: If diets worked, we’d all be thin already.  Theres a great saying “Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results?”
6.  Diets may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. At worst, they ruin lives: Weight obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young people. One UK study found that in their 14-year-old sample, 17.9% had significant concerns about their shape and weight, and in the 16-year-old sample, 40.7% had some form of disordered eating behaviour (fasting, purging, or binge eating), 11.3% at a level compatible with a DSM-5 eating disorder diagnosis ( Bould et al 2018).

Maybe we need to rethink how we talk about healthy weights and dieting. Maybe we should talk to young people about, how by noticing their bodies’ cues and working with their appetite, slowing down and noticing we may have happier and healthier adults.

At its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. It takes willpower and willpower is limited. Its hard to sustain, and anything that requires consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to fail as your mind and attention will move onto something else.

References –

(Aamodt TEDGLOBAL 2013 accessed 2/1/19).

Bould, H., De Stavola, B., Lewis, G. et al.Do disordered eating behaviours in girls vary by school characteristics? A UK cohort study Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry (2018) 27: 1473