Basic Dieting Advice

                Over the last month I gave you some basic facts about the four macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats, protein, and alcohol. All of that information was intended to give you a basic understanding of the different macronutrients and potentially debunk any myths you might have had. A basic understanding is needed before you can make informed decisions on what kind of diet is best for you. However, I realize there is still a gap in practical application. With this newsletter I want to give you all some tips on how to approach dieting. By no means will this be an exhaustive list but it is the basics to get you on the right track to help you reach your goals.

What is a diet?

                What does the phrase “I’m on a diet,” make you think of?  You might be thinking of someone trying to lose weight and you just offered them a muffin. Maybe you are thinking of someone following the new juice cleanse trend or keto fad diet. No matter what comes to your mind, our society has a large influence on how we see dieting. Dieting is commonly seen as being highly restrictive, with either the types of foods we eat or the quantity. A diet to me is simply “food and drink regularly provided or consumed”. It is nothing more and nothing less.

A diet should not be seen as being implicitly restrictive, like many of us are taught. I believe the more restrictive a diet is, the less likely it is to be followed. As soon as a restrictive diet is broken, we as humans commonly feel that we are failures. This quickly leads to an all or nothing fallacy that could cause an individual to continue to break their diet and counteract any positive benefits they might have gained. This is commonly observed with people that follow keto for a few months to lose weight. After they break their diet, they often binge until they return to (or exceed) the weight they were at before. We need to see diets as a flexible tool and not a rigid, restrictive tool. If you have a negative connotation or not, you need to change your definition of a diet to allow it to be fluid and flexible. This way you can use it as tool to your advantage, instead of against you.  

Goal Setting

                A good diet is a tool that helps you achieve a desired goal. Goals can include anything from gaining muscle, improving mental health/cognition, increasing heart health, losing weight, increasing power output, or even combating autoimmune disorders. There are so many things that changing your diet can achieve. Before you change anything, you need to understand what your goals are. You need to know where you are going before you can get there. Having a good “why” is critical to maintaining a diet. Before implementing a change, you should create a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goal, one of my sources below is a blog post on how to create a SMART goal. This will keep you on track and give you clear guidance on how you will achieve that goal.               

Maintenance

                A decent diet, aligned with your goal, that is followed 100% of the time is better than a perfect diet that is never followed. We could spend all day theorizing the best diets to maximize certain benefits and come up with the most elaborate diet schemes, but the more extreme a diet is the harder it will be to maintain. For example, I followed a diet for a while called the vertical diet. Without going too into the weeds on it, it consisted of eating the same thing every day. My goal was to gain muscle mass and weight without gaining a lot of fat and improve my strength. I was able to follow the diet for a couple weeks but ultimately started to eat less because it just did not taste good anymore. I got sick of eating the same thing for 6 meals a day every day. I started to skip meals and take cheat days where I actually ate less food. Ultimately, my performance stopped improving and I stopped gaining muscle because I did not want to eat that boring food anymore. Another time I tried to gain weight, I simply added in foods I enjoyed to eat that were higher in protein throughout the day and allowed myself a day a week where I ate whatever I wanted. I successfully gained a large amount of weight and was able to maintain it because I was not too restrictive. Yes, the second diet was not as “ideal”, but it was successful because I was able to stick to it. Give yourself freedom to be flexible with your diet so that you don’t get trapped into thinking of yourself as a failure when you “cheat” your diet. You are not a failure when you are trying to make yourself better.

Small Changes

Don’t get fixated on the current fad diet that promises extreme changes. It is natural for us to want to seek out the “get rich quick” or “lose weight fast” schemes. With your diet and weight loss/gain specifically, this is the worst trap. Our body is amazing at maintaining the status quo. It helps us survive in the most extreme situations by normalizing what is happening to us both mentally and physically. This is essential for survival but detrimental when we want to make a change in our lives. Our body has many hormonal processes in place that cause opposite reactions when we sense changes occurring. Often, many of these reactions are disproportionally larger than the original change. For example, being on a short-term extreme caloric deficit diet will result in hormonal signaling to increase dietary consumption and energy storage. In some cases of extreme caloric defects, this hormonal signaling could last for a couple years. The more extreme of a change you introduce to your body, the more extreme of response you will have. That is why it is so important to focus on making small incremental changes that can be maintained.

No matter what your health goal is, your diet can help you achieve that goal. However, it is important that you keep these principles in mind. We want to have SMART goals that are maintainable and only make small changes at a time. These principles are critical for following a diet but are also important when making other changes into your lifestyle.

Benton, D., & Young, H. A. (2017). Reducing Calorie Intake May Not Help You Lose Body Weight. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 703–714. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617690878

Definition of DIET. (n.d.). Retrieved October 16, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diet

How to write SMART goals (with examples). (2021, December 26). Work Life by Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/how-to-write-smart-goals