The Number 1 Positive of Diets (and How to Avoid the Negatives)
The Number 1 Positive of Diets
(and How to Avoid the Negatives)
If you've ever wanted to make a change to your health or body composition, no doubt you've had the thought "I need to go on a diet". What we really mean is we believe we need to change from what we are currently doing. What we mean is we need to follow a plan.
For many people, these diets have a positive effect our their health, leading to some of the desired changes we're seeking, until they often "stop working".
This kicks off the diet cycle, and ever going process of following diets too hard to maintain in the long term. We start a new diet and get initial results. The results start to slow as our body adapts to the new diet, we become frustrated as results dry up, we seek to eat things outside of the diet (usually the fun foods) until finally we're completely fed up with the diet and add the weight all back on again.
That is, until we start this cycle all over again.
Instead I believe there's a better and simpler way to get results, and it all starts with the number one benefit to starting a new diet.
The Positives of Diets
Recently I started a new diet, a quite difficult one called the Paleo AIP (auto immune protocol) diet. The diet, taking elements of the Paleo Diet, is a lot more strict because more foods have been removed which have been shown to effect the auto immune systems of some people. The aim of the diet is to improve our immune systems, in my case a rheumatoid arthritis problem I'm having in my knees.
This is a case of using our diets to improve our health, as opposed to our performance in a sporting or physique sense. The result for me, while still a long process, have been encouraging, for reasons unintended. I'm leaner, have better energy levels, less aches and pains, and have less cravings. Again, unintended benefits, but nice to have. The biggest benefit of the diet however, and the true benefit of diets, has been AWARENESS.
We say we're going on and diet. Actually we already are on a diet, it just has no rules, no guidelines, no restrictions.
So when we go on a diet, this is actually what we're looking for: structure, awareness, rules, guidelines. Otherwise, there is chaos in our eating, and interestingly, it's like we forget what eating healthy means.
These guidelines bring clarity and order to our decisions, which if we can maintain for a long enough time, brings us the results we're seeking.
For this reason, many diets actually work for many people, and there is no best diet for all of us. There is only the diet which you can maintain easiest. It may even get to the point where you enjoy a diet so much, the awareness is standard, and you've formed habits around your diet which make your choices automatic.
It's when we become used to, or fed up with a diet, that awareness starts to dissolve until we're back to our classic no rules diet.
The Negatives of Diets
There are negatives to diets as well, many which you may have experienced before.
One of the words I used above sums it up well: restriction. For many of us, not having the freedom to eat what we want is too much to handle. A lack of self discipline, patience, clarity and planning means after a few weeks or months of actually getting some good results before hitting a plateau, we're left frustrated and slowly (sometimes quickly) drop off the diet. This, for many people puts them in an even worse position than when they started.
The diets themselves are not to blame. For instance, if you followed the Paleo Diet, only to find your results stalling, it's not the diet doesn't work. Many times it's related to the amount of calories we're consuming; sometimes it's because we're not following it well enough. Going on a diet does not necessarily mean we're lowering calories in a way that would lead to long term fat loss. On the other side of the same coin, we could lower our calories without actually changing the types of food we're eating. In this way our diet is calorie based.
The easiest way to avoid this negative is to not see it as a fat loss diet; at least don't see it as the fat loss diet. The answer you've been searching for all your life.
A Better Way to Look At Diets
I would actually see most diets as experiments, lasting 4 to 12 weeks at most, with the aim to determine what works for you. This is a big shift from the classic "lose weight" reason, which puts the focus on a short term result. This is not wrong, but can put us in a success/fail scenario; missing many of the benefits we may have actually got from the diet because we didn't achieve an arbitrary number we chose.
No success (eg we didn't lose the 10 kilograms in 10 weeks), and the diet is classed as a failure. However, there may have been great new habits learned during the diet, great new meals which would be classed as healthy no matter which diet you follow, and an overall better feeling, be it mood, energy or general mental health.
Furthermore, when we have a end to the diet, we can get through it easier. It feels like less restriction and more like that experiment. It's not something that has no end in sight, but a method to get some good short results, with the knowledge we need a plan for afterwards.
What's another positive to diets aside from the "lose weight" goal? What's another way we can look at diets to ensure we don't start a never ending cycle of success versus failure?
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