If you’ve crashed out of a diet more than once before, for the same reason each time, it may save you a lot of angst and hard work to look at what caused the de-railing. The problem may be to do with specific eating habits rather than your overall diet…
What if you could take a step back and see more clearly why dieting hasn’t worked for you in the past?
However much of a mess you feel your eating is right now, you can make changes. But you may not be clear where to start. In this article I’d like to invite you to think about whether any of 4 key patterns of eating apply to you in a way that keeps you in an unhappy eating cycle.
Eat, regret, repeat
I’ve seen lots of people whose unhappiness around eating boiled down to one or more of these 4 eating habits:
- Overeating (portion sizes too large)
- Unintended eating (grazing, snacking)
- Craving particular foods
- Emotional eating
In the interests of full disclosure, before I developed Appetite Retraining, I regularly did all four of these, and occasionally now still find myself reverting back, but as that is an occasional thing, it’s ok.
How to know whether these are relevant to you
What if you could learn more about the science of weight loss and weight gain, and understand better whether what has kept you stuck is to do with your genes or to do with eating habits you’re developed over the years (or a mix of the two)?
I’m hoping that armed with this understanding, you could make a new sort of plan to enhance your confidence around eating, and enhance your enjoyment of food.
The biology of weight gain
Our weight, and the level at which it’s easy for us to stay at that weight, is controlled in large part, by our genes. This means that weight loss is not a level playing field.
Learning about the biology and genetics of weight gain will help you understand where you are on the un-level playing field and help you develop greater compassion for yourself. Starting from that point will make what you do in relation to any eating changes better-informed.
Here’s a really helpful article in The Conversation by two leading researchers in the field of weight regulation, Dr Amy Ahern and Professor Giles Yeo. If you’d like to learn more, Giles Yeo’s book Gene Eating1 explains more about the genetic basis of weight regulation in a readable and informative way.
Our genetic make-up governs the development of systems within our bodies that regulate (among other things) our food intake. The human appetite system has certain features which, although variable across individuals, has certain characteristics that we share.
A key part of this system is the signalling between gut and brain about our current nutritional status. This subsystem itself is really complex, but something we can use to our advantage is awareness of the signals – hunger and fullness – that guided our feeding when we were infants and that may be hugely helpful in re-learning to regulate our eating now.
This brings me on to how we notice and respond to these signals, which is about the psychology of appetite. I’ve been studying this area for over a decade now in the process of developing Appetite Retraining, and have found that re-learning to connect with your appetite system opens a gateway to changing how you eat, and maybe what you weigh, without ‘going on a diet’. Not only does this mean you eat more healthily, but you feel emotionally empowered too.
The psychology of weight gain
I would like to suggest that a key reason many of us gain weight is that we lose touch with our hunger and fullness signals and find ourselves eating when we’re not hungry and continuing to eat beyond the point of fullness.
If this were only an occasional thing, it wouldn’t lead to weight gain, but when these patterns become habits, the day-in, day-out extra intake does. It’s how we eat regularly that determines what we weigh, so what matters is our regular eating habits.
Eating habits
Books about habit change have hit the bestseller lists over recent years, which is great! It means that behavioural science is moving into the mainstream, where it can help us in our daily lives.
But eating habits are a special case – they aren’t just the result of learned associations – they have the power of the human appetite system behind them. A system which evolved to equip us with powerful drives to seek out and consume food.
The very processes which evolved to get us to eat are now, in our new food environment, posing challenges which are hard to deal with:
- How to wait until we are actually hungry, when we are bombarded with images and reminders of tasty foods round the clock
- Once we’ve started eating, how to stop when we’re just full, rather than overeating, when what we’re eating is irresistibly moreish
- How to manage cravings for foods that have been engineered to hit all the pleasure points in our brains
- How to reduce our reliance on high-calorie pleasurable foods to deal with feelings of stress, boredom etc when those foods do the job pretty well
Diets focus on food rather than eating habits
These challenges of our modern world aren’t the main focus of diets. You may find yourself successfully losing weight on, say, a low carb diet, only to find yourself lapsing into old patterns when you’re tempted by not-so-low-carb salted caramel brownies.
If you try and rescue the situation by switching to a new diet – let’s say you join a diet club – you may find the same thing repeating. Each new diet shows promise, but what scuppers you is the same old patterns, whether that’s eating more than you need, or caving in to cravings.
What I want to suggest, is that particularly if you’ve tried different weight loss diets and none of them works for you for long, it may help to take a step back and look at your eating landscape by asking yourself
- What eating patterns required by past diets didn’t work for me?
- What food did I have to cut out on past diets that I missed too much to stick to?
Note that we’re thinking about diet ‘failure’ here not in terms of what you failed to do, but in terms of what requirements of the diet were unsustainable for you.
How you eat now, and how you’d rather be eating
There’s now a widespread acceptance amongst dietitians and other health professionals that the best diet for you is the one you can stick to, so that any weight you lose is not re-gained.
Different types of eating patterns work for different people – one person might love living low-carb, enjoying meals high in protein and fat. Another may be vegan, focusing on plant-based foods. Yet another might want the mix of an omnivorous diet.
To lose weight and keep it off, it doesn’t matter what your current eating patterns are, or what your history of weight loss attempts is2. Which is reason for optimism.
“people can achieve weight loss maintenance despite their baseline dietary intake and baseline physical activity level. The most important determinants appear to be those that involve change in behaviour”
The specific changes you can work on
The 4 habits (overeating, unintended eating, cravings and emotional eating), may potentially derail any eating plan or diet eventually, so it’s worth pausing and thinking about addressing them. I’ve written blogs that are relevant to each, so you can read more by following the links below…
There are lots of articles in my blog so you can look through and pick out ones that are relevant to you, but I’ve selected a few that are relevant to the 4 eating habits I’m talking about now…
- Overeating (portion sizes too large)
“How to find your off-switch and gain confidence around eating”
- Unintended eating (grazing, snacking)
“How can I stop grazing on junk food all day?”
- Craving particular foods
“How to overcome cravings so you can enjoy your favourite foods without overeating”
- Emotional eating
“How to deal with boredom without eating”
References
1. Yeo, G (2018) Gene Eating: The Story of Human Appetite. Orion Books
2. Varkevisser et al (2019) Determinants of weight loss maintenance: a systematic review. Obesity Reviews doi: 10.1111/obr.12772