The word diet has become a scary word for many. The thought of dieting is immediately associated with weight or fat loss. However a diet is simply the collection of foods that one eats. There are weight gain diets and maintenance diets, and others along with the fat loss ones. For the sake of this article series though we're going to be analyzing fat loss dieting. For many it comes with the idea that you have to cut out all your favorite foods, only eat salads with plain chicken breasts on it or do one of the buzzword diets that everybody seems to be doing. In order to get to the root of an effective diet there are two very broad categories that need to be examined to determine its success. The first being did the diet do what it was supposed to? In this case - did the diet make you lose the weight or fat that you wanted it to? The second category is the one that is usually missed. Did the weight you wanted to stay off continue to stay off after the diet? That second category is the one that is usually overlooked.
Lets go ahead and tackle the first requirement for a successful diet in how it goes about shedding a person's weight. The one sentence answer is that the person consumed fewer calories than the amount that they burned. A simple enough concept but the amount of input into the consuming versus the burning is both astronomical and impossible to account for completely. The interesting thing about the most popular advertised diet is how they utilize the calories in part of the equation in a simple way. Here's the one sentence version for a few of them.
Keto - Eliminate entire food group in carbohydrates
Atkins - Eliminate entire food group in carbohydrates
Carnivore - Eliminate entire food group in carbohydrates, vegetables, and anything from a plant
Paleo - Eliminates anything not available to hunter-gatherers
Vegan - Eliminate all animal food sources
Vegetarian - Eliminate meat as a food source
Intermittent fasting - Eliminate entire blocks of time that otherwise would have food
See the trends here? Limit a person's intake by limiting their options and thereby making it easier to just consume less. In terms of lowering calorie intake that is a good start but there is still the fact that if someone were to eat 3,000 calories a day of chicken, rice, and/or broccoli but only burn 2,500 calories throughout the day then in a week they will have gained one pound of fat. Intermittent fasting is the same way - eat 3,000 calories in the day's allotted time, burn 2500, and gain a pound in a week. So, in order to design the calorie deficit strategy that works for someone there are components of eating that need to be controlled effectively. Chief of which is hunger.
Hunger is meant to be something that ensures you always have fuel so if your fuel reserves get low, you get hungry, then you eat and you can continue existing. The nature of hunger though is that it's supposed to keep someone out of a caloric deficit. After all, having excess weight is needed so that energy can be obtained during periods of food scarcity. Fortunately for surviving to the next day food is always plentiful. Unfortunately for ideal body composition the majority of that food is designed to make you want more making the need to trick your body into thinking it has enough food a necessity. Tricking one's body into feeling like it's not in a calorie deficit is one of the most important skills to master and requires choosing foods that can make you feel satiated (satisfied, not hungry) and keep you sustained throughout the day.
The keys to making your body not feel hungry when you are eating less than is needed to maintain weight are to make sure the foods chosen are highly satiating and that they take longer to digest. Unfortunately that comes with the implication that super tasty highly palatable foods are not a good choice. The key to food choices are to choose foods that have a high volume to calorie ratio and to eat carbs, fats and proteins together to further slow digestion. If you were to take 1,000 calories of broccoli and put it next to 1,000 calories of peanut butter the difference in space taken would be quite large. If these were to be eaten the broccoli would quite literally fill the stomach to a larger extent than the peanut butter. For the palatability factor, just think about how many potato chips, pieces of candy, or slices of cake can be eaten without impacting hunger very much. A common thing heard when someone is offered another piece of cake at a birthday party is "oh i shouldn't" and not "I can't eat any more" unless they've already eaten a huge meal before the cake.
The trouble with denying the cake, potato chips, candy or a person's kryptonite food is what I call the "forbidden fruit factor" where it becomes a mystical, denied object and therefore the most desirable. What it boils down to is that a great way to improve adherence to a diet is to actually include the kryptonite foods. Having a diet that is 100% perfect with only the healthy foods that don't taste very good is a diet that will either fall off during or immediately after once the goal has been reached. More on the latter later. A balance is therefore needed to be struck between the "good" and "bad" choices. However those labels are very antagonistic and therefore I would recommend not using them. I divide food categories into "nutrient dense" and "non nutritive dense foods" or NNDF for short. By taking the emotional label of good or bad food off the table (bad pun intended, I couldn't resist) and labeling it in a clinical fashion the forbidden fruit factor can be taken away. The food can then be focused on for what it is as opposed to what it can make a person feel.
Controlling emotions around eating is probably the most difficult skill to master when it comes to a successful diet as deviations are generally caused by emotional disruption. Whether it's boredom, a stressful day at work or just feeling lonely, a very immediately gratifying way to cope is to eat and in those times it's probably not an apple that gets chosen. A pint of ice cream can be gone in minutes. A jar of peanut butter or nutella will go even more quickly. These situations are some of the real culprits to a diet failing in the early stages. Sometimes it can be masked as an availability issue. Whether it's the claim of not having time to make something so anything was grabbed or "I was on a road trip and had to get a meal at a gas station" the key is in deciding what is actually available. 30 years ago the gas station excuse might have been a viable one but these days the vast majority of gas stations have a protein bar selection, beef jerky, dried fruit bags, protein shakes, and a selection of nuts. Not having time to make a meal can be negated with food prep or having those healthy gas station options available at home or work. There are enough options that at the minimum protein and calorie requirements can be met for that meal. The "deciding what is actually available" aspect is a key interpretation for the accessibility of NNDF choices. After all, the gas station and grocery store are also filled with potato chips, ice cream, candy and more. It takes a conscious choice to go towards or away from NNDF and decide that the beef jerky and peanuts are the correct decision. Same goes for the grocery store. The good news is that with nutrient dense foods bought and the store exited that the temptation goes away. So if someone lives alone they can just not buy or throw out the foods that are too tempting but if someone doesn't live alone it becomes more complicated. Add in children and the snacks they have to have and it becomes very hard.
Redirecting the desire to eat NNDF choices when the availability is there and stress is high can make for a very large amount of work. A very understandable outcome is that if a person does 5 fat loss diets throughout the period of a couple years with periods of weight gain or maintenance in between that the fat loss diets would be incrementally more adhered to. The first fat loss diet may have 12 unplanned eating derailments, the second one 10, third one 4, fourth one 6 and the final diet 3. The key is to figure out coping mechanisms and ways to redirect the feelings or impulsive desires. This is highly individual but there are some general tools that can be adapted with personal tweaks as needed. Someone may take a walk to quite literally get them out of the house for 10-20 minutes so the desire goes away and something productive has taken its place. Some write in a journal to document what's going on and analyze what is behind the feeling. Others will let themselves have 100-200 calories of the food and stop but do this a maximum of one time per week. This final one is dangerous and for many will just cause a cascade of incoming calories that can negate any progress made over the last week or two. A rare few are just hardcore declaring the ability to restrain themselves and then following through on that claim. My recommendation is to do a combination of some of these. Redirect with an activity, think or write about how the feeling came about, and most importantly eat NNDF throughout the week in a designated fashion.
A great rule of thumb for adherence is the 80/20 rule. Where 80% of the food eaten consists of nutrient dense foods that provide a good spread of micronutrients, protein, healthy fats and so on. The other 20% comes in the form of NNDF foods that would allow the dieter to stick to their goal numbers by not experiencing the temptation of foods that are supposedly bad or not allowed. With everything being allowed the allure just isn't as strong. Figuring out whether it's more beneficial to have some chocolate at the end of each day, incorporate candy into the post workout meal, or to have an extravagantly indulgent dessert once a week is a great tool to both give yourself something to look forward to and say you don't need something because you had it recently. This isn't just the key to having the first category of the diet succeed in its goal, it's also paramount to the second category of being able to keep the weight off.
The story of someone doing a diet successfully with a very noticeable amount of weight loss is a great one but the story of someone who succeeded and then the weight came back afterwards is also very common. The seemingly never ending cycle of crash diets with quick results then being abandoned early or body weight just bouncing back afterwards spans even decades for some. That topic is handled in part 2.
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