We’re kicking off a series of conversations with people with different perspectives on all things health, nutrition and fitness. It might challenge your assumptions, or even inspire you to try something you previously thought you never would!
This week we're chatting to nutritionist and coach Vic about fad diets. Nearly everyone you speak to has tried one at some point, so we wanted to know more about why we buy into fad diets, how to spot the red flags and how to break the cycle. Let's talk about it.
What is it about Fad Diets?
Can anyone else remember when you’d have to go to a video rental shop to choose a film to watch? You’d sometimes spend ages browsing the genres, deciding on something that’s right for you, take it home, watch it and then have to ensure you returned it again on time. It was a whole process!
Now? We can click just a couple of buttons and have a film to watch, on demand, exactly when we want it.
Now you’ve humoured the trip down memory lane, we'll explain why this is relevant to our approach to health & fitness.
While history shows us that we’ve always had a penchant for a ‘quick fix’ when it comes to weight loss, this has shown no signs of slowing down in recent years with more and more marketing touch-points, and a constant plethora of new and radical ‘diets’ promising miracle results.
Back to the movie at home analogy… the coming of age for having things on demand is exactly why we don’t have that same ritual and long-winded process we used to have to go through.
We’ve become more and more accustomed to having what we want, when we want it (usually instantly!). But unfortunately for us… the human body just doesn’t work in the same way.
It’s frustrating, I know. But we can’t just click a button and get from A to B on demand when it comes to health and fitness goals.
Fad Diets… Often ‘Outcome’ Focused
There’s a common issue with fad diets, and this is that they’re heavily ‘outcome’ focused so you spend your time fixated on the end goal. There’s no focus or emphasis placed on the actions and processes needed to improve your mindset and behaviours over time.
One of the issues with focusing on the outcome is that it’s not necessarily something we have control over, and depending on your goals, the outcome can feel far away and out of reach.
By flipping the focus onto ‘process’ goals (e.g. average daily step count, eating the right amount of calories - actions that will help us towards an outcome), we are placing the emphasis on focusing on each day as it comes which - with some acceptance that we can’t be 100% all of the time - allows us to hit goals along the journey, not just focus on one very large goal that might feel miles away.
Fad Diets… Far From Our Reality
The catch here is that the ‘quick fix’ often does not work when it comes to sustaining your results. Why?
Because it’s very often packaged up (hello, ‘fad diets’) in a way that moves it so far away from our current eating habits and lifestyle, that even if you can stick to it for a short period of time (and many can’t or won’t), it tends to teach you absolutely nothing about how to maintain your results.
In other words, you can’t translate any of it back into your real world. So you go back to all of your old habits, and potentially back to overconsuming food because of being under such a high level of restriction.
After a period of time… another fad comes along and the cycle begins over again.
Fad diets… ‘miracle’ results?
The other common attraction to fad diets is a promise of very quick, seemingly miraculous results (you know the one, ‘XX person lost 7lbs in their first week’). The issue here is that it doesn’t differentiate between weight loss and fat loss.
When you drastically reduce food intake (usually in the form of carbs), you will lose weight from water, glycogen and a reduced volume of food travelling through your digestive system (and provided you’re in a calorie deficit, some body fat).
Because this places the emphasis on scale weight from the get-go, we see these numbers as a sign of success (or failure) and stop taking any other signs of progress into consideration for the weeks that follow.
This is tricky to unlearn, but it’s important to only ever use scales to show trends over time (weeks and months, not day by day), and use pictures and measurements to tell us more about the changes taking place.
We should also focus on other signs of progress too e.g. feeling healthier and happier, learning to tune into your hunger and satiety levels, improved outlook on food, feeling out of breath less often etc.
How to Spot a Fad Diet?
Here are some key points and look-outs to give you a general guide of how you can spot a fad diet, even when it’s in disguise:
● The emphasis may be on exclusion* (cutting out any single foods or whole food groups)
● The focus may be hero-ing one singular food or ingredient (e.g. celery, lemon juice)
● You have to buy a product for it to be successful (a pill*, shake, device)
● It will come with lots of strict rules (e.g. when or what you can and can’t eat)
● It comes a promise or guarantee of amount of weight lost (possibly even in a set timescale)
● One that doesn’t mention the role of energy balance (calories in vs calories out)
The ‘Fad Diet’ Hangover…
You wouldn’t be alone in having gone down the route of any diet that ticks one or more of these boxes. You may find that certain behaviours or habits developed through these patterns of eating continue to pervade your everyday life even now:
● Over-attachment to, or measuring your worth based on your scale weight on any given day
● Exercising to ‘burn off’ calories consumed (or burning calories to ‘earn’ food)
● Maintaining a lot of strict rules when it comes to foods consumed or eating habits, such as when you will allow yourself to eat
● Feeling fear around higher calorie options (e.g. Olive oil, full fat yoghurt) and not allowing yourself to consume these, even outside of a fat loss goal
● You feel you can’t trust yourself around certain foods
The Solution?
Ask yourself four important questions next time you feel tempted by a new shiny weight loss product or solution:
● ‘Is the majority of what I’d be doing in this process something that will translate into my life after I’ve lost the weight I’m aiming to lose?’
● ‘Does this seem like something I’ll end up doing again, and again, and again?’ (if yes, this is a red flag!)
● ‘Can I see myself doing what I’m doing in week 1 in several weeks time and being okay with it?’
● ‘Will this see me acting in accordance with my personal values, or against them?’
It’s important to remember we’re all individual; beyond just the calorie deficit needed for us to see fat loss over time, when it comes to the method, what may work for some, may not work for others and you’re very rarely seeing the full picture.
We have to always consider the context of our background, our lifestyle, our attitude and outlook and importantly, our values when making decisions about the method we use to get to our goals.
You won’t always pick the right avenue for you first time, but hopefully this helps you avoid falling back into the cycle of methods that have not worked for you in the past.
A note on fast fat loss:
It’s important that we differentiate between rapid fat or weight loss, and fad diets. In a number of cases, when supervised by a professional, rapid fat loss may be a very helpful and effective tool, but under the wrong circumstances or undertaken for the wrong reasons, it can quickly be a detrimental and even dangerous approach to losing weight. Whilst there’s potential for physical harm, we also have to consider the psychological impact it may have on someone.
As an approach, it tends to place a lot of emphasis on restriction, rigidity and rules and for many this creates problems such as poor eating habits, a bad relationship with food, fear of eating in social situations, even placing some foods off limits unnecessarily.
*Unless medically recommended and supervised
