“That’s it, I’ve been losing weight since Monday!”, “I can’t do this, I’m on a diet”, “How many calories are there?”, “… but on Saturdays I allow myself to cheat meal” … Familiar? Why do many diets end in failures, and the pounds shed with difficulty come back again? Perhaps the fact is that any diet is harmful to the body.
You have probably experienced this many times. “That’s it, tomorrow on a diet,” you promised yourself and solemnly began the morning with the “right” breakfast of complex carbohydrates. Then — a brisk walk to a stop, skip lunch and praise yourself for the willpower to resist hunger, steamed broccoli dinner, thinking about which sports club to get a card in.
Maybe you lasted a week, maybe a month. Perhaps you have lost a few kilograms, or maybe the arrow of the scales has remained at the same mark, plunging you into despair and leading to another breakdown “let it all burn with fire.” Probably, like most people, diets plunge you into despondency, depression, make you hate yourself. Why is this happening?
To begin with, let’s turn to the ruthless statistics: 95% of people who lose weight with the help of a diet return to their previous weight, and often also gain a few extra pounds. It is customary to blame the person himself and his allegedly weak will for this, although scientific evidence tells a completely different story: our body is simply programmed for survival and tries to complete this task in any way.
What happens to the body on a diet? First, when we are on a low calorie diet, our metabolism slows down. The body receives the signal “there is little food, we accumulate everything in fat”, and as a result, we literally get fat from a lettuce leaf. Studies have shown that in anorexic people, the body absorbs calories from almost any food, while in a person who does not starve, excess calories can simply be excreted from the body. The body independently makes many decisions that we cannot influence, it solves its own tasks, which do not always correspond to our ideas about beauty.
If the body signals a lack of energy, all forces rush to its prey, actively sending a “get food” signal to the mind.
Secondly, on a low-calorie diet, you want to eat all the time, but you don’t want to move at all, despite the plans to “eat less, exercise more.” Again, this is not our decision: the body saves energy and, through increased hunger, asks us to get food. This is accompanied by low mood, apathy, increased irritability, which does not help to follow the intended fitness plan. No food, no strength and energy, no good mood.
Thirdly, many diets exclude sweets, although sugar is just one form of energy. Another thing is that we most often overeat (that is, we eat more than our energy needs require) precisely sweets, and here again … diets are to blame. This is proved by an interesting experiment on rats fed with delicious biscuits. The group of rats that ate normally ate cookies in normal amounts, but the rats that had previously been in a semi-starved state literally pounced on sweets and could not stop.
The scientists found that the pleasure center in the brains of rats in the second group reacted differently to sweets, causing them to experience feelings of euphoria and bliss, while for the other group of rats, food remained just food. Diets that include «allowed» and «forbidden» foods encourage us to crave the forbidden fruit, which is known to be sweet.
It is quite difficult to “deceive” the feeling of hunger: we are dealing with a universal survival machine, the systems of which have been perfected over millions of years of evolution of living beings. If the body signals a lack of energy, all the forces rush to its prey, actively sending the signal “get food” to the mind.
What to do? First of all, realize that you have nothing to do with it. You are one of the millions of victims of a diet culture that obliges women to dream of a thin body and achieve it in any way. We are created different: different heights, weights, shapes, eye and hair colors. It is an illusion that every person can acquire any body. If this were so, there would not be such an epidemic of obesity, which was largely provoked by the dietary culture and the mechanisms described above. The body simply protects itself from hunger and helps us survive.
The second important point is the banal phrase “taking care of yourself”. Often we say we want to lose weight for health reasons, but ask yourself how long ago you had a routine checkup with a gynecologist or dentist. How much time do you spend sleeping and resting? It is the unstable regime of the day and hormonal disorders that can give the body a signal to gain weight.
The third point is the need to stop torturing yourself with diets. Instead, you can learn about alternatives — the concepts of mindful and intuitive eating, the main goal of which is to help you build a relationship with the body, with feelings of hunger and fullness, so that the body receives all the energy it needs and does not save anything for a rainy day. . It is important to learn to understand when you are hungry, and when you are captured by emotions and you are trying to cope with them with food.
If you have depression, then there may well be problems with overeating: the body is trying to compensate for the lack of endorphins
Fourth, rethink the approach to physical activity. Training is not a punishment for eating a cake, not torture in the hope of losing a kilogram by tomorrow. Movement can be a joy to the body: swimming, walking to your favorite music, cycling — any option that gives you pleasure, relaxes and puts your thoughts in order. Boxing after a hard and conflict-filled day. Pole dancing to feel your own sexuality.
The issue that deserves attention is your mental health. If you have depression, then there may well be problems with overeating: the body tries to compensate for the lack of endorphins with food. In some cases, there is alcohol dependence and a subsequent feeling of loss of control over eating behavior.
Eating disorders are a separate line: anorexia, bulimia, bouts of gluttony. In this case, it is necessary to consult a specialist, and diets not only will not help, but can also seriously harm.
No matter how you look at it, diets do nothing but harm — both for mental and physical health. Giving them up can be very difficult, but living in a diet cage is even harder.
Prepared by Elena Lugovtsova.