Lessons

Lesson Info

Negative Causes of Diets

Has anybody ever lost a good amount of weight and then gained it back and I'd love to hear from the audience as well um ah erica until hell yeah I lost about thirty pounds and I was feeling really good and then I just got out of that habits that I was in and also it is a lot of what you're saying is just you're you're speaking is actually like what I've gone through and where I've been um and yeah, I just sort of didn't incorporate good habits into my lifestyle and it was really easy to get it back and then but then how do you feel after awful isn't really isn't the worst yeah, you think about that while I saw this person that I had lost the weight and then I'm seeing him now that I've gained it back and they've probably seen that two other times and so definitely demoralizing right? I mean it is that you guys ever seen the show the biggest loser do is know about these four people do you know that they like they'll lose like one hundred pounds or whatever more and and suffer and then a...

nd then inevitably like this is like like sometimes it makes this news like oprah I think has had some interviews with some of the people like the guy that won the biggest one like he lost more weight than anyone on any show hey ended up gaining more than half of it back what you know and just listening to him talk about how that feels because he thought he had this problem solved and just to have it all unravel like what you know, why would you try again? You know, like that stuff so I feel like the psychology that comes with that sort of demoralization it's like, is it? You know, I would you know, if it was me like I would question if it's me um I just not capable of being healthy um I just two week t do these things that other people seem to think I should be able to do and tell me I need to do all the time you know, this is this is it's a shaming and demoralizing and really a horrible situation to be in and out that is what happens when you use restriction and suffering to diet it's like, you know, it's like I wouldn't like when we talk about diets, right? We think like, why did we do him like like I get like, I mean, usually it's funny it's like I pulled people and I'll ask him like, do you think diets work and they'll be like, um well, they they're like they think about the ones they've done, they know they're not in good shape they think about like like celebrities and tell the celebrity fad diets and they know that those kind of don't work and I think you know what diets don't work but then and so they'll tell me this is like they believe diets don't work but then they'll you know, read something about it something like online like the next day do a little bit of research on and then try it the next morning because the truth is that first little bit amount of time diets do work right like you couldn't I can give you I could write down a meal plan for you guys and just give it to you like and people do this all the time by the way almost every popular diet but that's what it is I could just give you a meal plan and if you just follow it it'll be a low calorie diet and you'll lose weight. The problem is it'll come back with a vengeance and you will develop all these bad habits you know you'll develop things like what the hell effects you'll develop the counter regulatory eating your wipe out your willpower and you destroy your relationship with food by the way you suffer that whole time too and then it goes away right then it comes back and there's it's it's just so frustrating it's such a it's such an awful thing but it's like but it's like it's understandable why there's that allure right it's understandable why when we get stuck when we're at our low moments when we're like gosh to buy another bigger outfit you know I have teo I have tow your akash my sister's getting married I have to be in the wedding about I don't want to die it again like and you don't want tio but there's no you don't feel like there's any other way and and it just makes me I hear these stories all the time and it just breaks my heart because it's such a unpleasant and self defeating process and I don't think we need it anymore so yeah, just interesting on dynamic I was kind of pondering you were talking about earlier you mentioned earlier the success comes when the right habits are formed you believe there's something you saw that that, um and then there's the idea of following you were saying giving a meal plan and just following this meal plan so if someone were to follow this thiss meal plan and develop these habits by just following it are they setting themselves up? I have for success per se because they're developing these happens eso giving somebody a meal plan isn't the same is giving somebody habits um and I'm going to get into that in excruciating teo the next the rest of the day that's what today is about I'm just what I want to emphasize is s oh, that's a good that's a really, really good question, so right? You think if I just do this diet, I'm just going to do this forever, right? But like we talked about with the willpower like is the problem? The problem is, when I give you a fifteen hundred calorie diet, you're starving like you are probably eating something you would rather not beating. You probably miss your favorite whatever burger place or whatever you're thinking ice cream like everybody has things they love that aren't super healthy, but on dso it's, giving somebody a plan is not the same as changing what they do forever, and that is actually a much, much more dynamic and, um, nuanced process really hard, but totally doable, but it's fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a restrictive diets, and I'll get into that in a bit. But my my point I'm trying to make right now is just that suffering if like if it's ever based on suffering and any meal plan that restricts things you like and that you normally do is suffering to some extent, right? And if that's your method it's going to fail, it is just a matter of time you can get through it for a day a week I've got it done for you here like I have done like low carb for a year where I didn't like I think I went a whole year and I got a like three carbs a day it was crazy it was awful bad breath you're grumpy but but it doesn't eventually stops working and that that's actually something that's really interesting to talk about too is that when you look at the success of diets long term when you look at a low fat regimen versus a low carb redman versus just a general like low calorie regimen uh and even and then let's say you're comparing all these groups so there's plenty of studies like this you can compare all this groups to control group who does nothing and you just have them write down their food every single group inevitably loses weight at the beginning including the control group, by the way because I call this the quantum effect of dieting tm just getting but basically just the the act of paying more attention just so these people are writing down their food so they can participate in experiment even though where they were not told to change anything they will lose way just because they're paying more attention than most of us eat mindlessly all day long like you know atomic thons but what happens when you look at the success rate of diets everybody loses weight people who do low carb diets lose weight a little faster they lose morris beginning, which is why they're very tempting on dh. But eventually, after about six months, everybody starts going back up and after a year equalizes almost every case unless something else changes because they're all restrictive plans has nothing to do with actually the food it has to do with whether or not you can keep doing it in order to saying this well, jerry the record echoing it, allow arches saying I tried the low carb diet for about a month and it worked, but I quickly gained it all back about ten kilograms in total on d c j w seventy translate ten kilograms for me. Thank you. Come on in the special orders for giving in pounds here now. C j w was saying that they tried weight watchers and they did lose a lot of weight. They lost about thirty pounds and they kept it off for a long time. But they just got sick and tired of weighing everything in writing it all down just to say it all came back. Great point. So when so when something is exhausting, like that's. Ah, that's a good thing you're never going to keep it up because that requires willpower, no matter how effective it is if you're spent less spending all your energy and counting is doing all these things I mean it's something is going to give in your life at some point and it's going to be the stuff that's not fun now he hasn't said how about all of our bill says he dropped seventy five pounds about seven years ago but he's only going back back about ten cents although they got some back that's still kept a significant amount of we didn't share exactly house to tell us bill, how did you do that? I think and I think that it is important to note that there are people who do keep weight off. So there there's this this registry of people who have lost I believe it's ten percent of their weight and kept it off for five years the and that's awesome like and I would never ever in a million years tell anybody that if they're doing something that works for them do it keep doing it that's amazing because everybody is different if you find what works for you like run with it but I think that that five year barrier is key there, right? Because anybody can lose weight for six months even a year it's that long term maintenance that is really, really tough and, you know what's really interesting about this this weight loss registry so it's only about I think five percent of dieters that that actually are able to accomplish this which is really small I mean that ninety five percent failure rate like who would accept that in any part of their life but but even more interesting to me is that they haven't it's not like all those people eat low carb you know it's not they don't all have a magic diet that they're doing it's like because it like that would be like like the holy grail of the dieting industry really? This is what works for everyone do it the problem is it's a lot more nuanced than that and what it comes down tio which we'll talk about is these people have figured out a way to integrate healthier habits into their lives that don't involve suffering and that that is the theme that is what's going to carry on and carry over we read your book back in the fall when we did the recalibration ten day thing and I'll tell you there was no suffering there at all it should have been but danny's just made just six spectacular dishes that tasted so good and we're lucky enough to have local vegetable so all of that stuff so sure we didn't eat sugar and sure we didn't have refined flours or whatever but man we really well and it was ten days so there was no suffering there was just a complete mind shift of what was eating what we were eating so why has it been so hard? My question is so why is it why give up why stop or why has it been so hard to go back to that and for movement from a willpower point of view I'm not even cooking so it's not even there's no effort on my behalf but I think sometimes that happens to where you know why you give up why do you not go back to something that wasn't that difficult in the first place I think may not have been that's a great point we'll get into that a big issue is just going to be ah so once you've discovered the amazing thing that I discovered which is that when you stop eating processed food that tastes like crap and you start eating real food that's actually good for you that actually tastes good so that what happened for me there is that's when the suffering one away because I was like this food is amazing this is the best food actually that I have ever eaten in my life because I'd been eating powder like like like chemicals from the lab that were low carb and low sugar fake sugar alcohols member those things um but so in the case that so you've gotten to a step that a lot of people haven't yet gotten to and we're going to talk about how to get there but the next step is tweaking the little things so you have the tools, but you haven't optimized your systems yet and that's, we're going to get in all of that action from our behalf. We travel a lot and so then you just get stuck and we're in the conference environment and you have free food. We did a block pose years ago. Free food isn't free. I think about it all the time because I'm always surrounded by free food. You guys could go on. My site is called ten reasons to never eat free food was one of my pop most popular articles ever anyway. No, and that that's true, because so one of you is hard. One of the issues of travel is that it throws off your habits and we'll talk about that as well. It's hard for me too. I travel a lot too awesome. Any other questions? This was a great little segway started truck company just a second jane on she's just saying she lost their dimensions and say how, but she gained it all back and she's saying hi, I'm assuming shows a little bit, although she's saying the age really seems to matter when it comes to losing weight sorry, jane, definitely it's harder hormones are really you have a huge factor in weight regulation. I was just going to add on to lenny I lost about fifty pounds but through a series of like twenty eight day cleanse or detox where you eliminate and go down to basics and then you add things back in and so about a week before you're eating basically really wonderful food healthy fresh nothing processed but I can't seem to continue that you just get stuck what do you think the reason is I think it's it's mental it's rationality you know I'm a little older you know there's the hormone thing going on and then I like to eat out I live alone now my kids are grown and so you know I'm cooking just for myself and it's so much easier even though I'm picking up you know maybe a healthy salad for dinner I'm still indulging sometimes in the cookies and the brownies and so there's other things you still want to eat way yes so there's still there is still a restriction and going on there right and we'll talk about howto get rid of that yet in the end that's exactly I mean that's why I'm here is to figure out how to continue or or make the habits really habits and not just a twenty eight day but how can I do it for a month and do anything for a monkey could do anything for months but absolutely the rest of my life would be it would be wonderful as we were gonna work okay I think you're next it's about ten years ago I thought I hit the holy grail and figuring it out which was have a goal so I joined the boot camp in the morning which the goal was every twelve weeks she should lose ten pounds cool it could do that then I doubled down on that and I joined a triathlon clubs I was working out at night as well wow s o I was eating for energy for the triathlon which turns out fueled my morning workouts so I did great until the triathlon event that was over and then my travel picked up so I couldn't attend all these workouts all the time I wasn't eating for the energy because you're not burning two thousand calories a week so that all the way came back and all my friends like well what happened you were so good and like I don't know what to say my life shifted but it kept trying to set goals and that didn't seem to do it either yeah goals are tricky because they're motivating kind of their short term of vision we'll talk a lot about motivation but we'll also be talking about how two tweak so this happens all the time right life happens like I have gone through phases where I you know I was a student for a long time and I was commuting on foot toe lab and I didn't even realize was burning so much calories walking every day I started working at home and I was working on my book, and even I was even eating better because the at home all the time and still going to the gym, but the gym was much closer of a commute and I started putting on weight and, you know, for me, it was like three, five pounds, like, no big deal, but I was, like, confused because I'm like on this like this, my thing, and it ultimately ended up being that I wasn't walking as much as I used to, and we'll get in all of this, but, uh, I'll give you techniques that you will learn to identify when things shift, and you aren't able to maintain a certain habit that you once had, but then add something different. Teo teo can track that, I think they basically covered at my question is like, I'm just getting to the point where I'm really enjoying that really food, like you're talking about and not and realizing just I always thought I liked the process stuff, but like, I'm realizing that I have bad habits, I'm realizing that I wantto reach for that food that I realized that I don't like just because it's a habit that I like, so you're going to talk about, you're dealing with those bad, how are you going? Do you deep deep into that um great so let's just say I think we we made a pretty good point here the dieting sucks can I get a eso obviously it's like really unpleasant see things you don't enjoy and it's really unpleasant to deny yourself things you love that's not cool I'm not called that I'm actually I'm gonna to say what I am cool with like my philosophy just to get this out there everyone knows about health, my philosophy about health and weight loss and all these things I only have one like I think I absolutely won't compromise on and it has nothing to do the carbs or sugar or wheat or fat or any of those things is just your life should be awesome, right? Like why are we doing this? Like why do we care so much about how we look? Why do we care so much about whether or not we're healthy it's? Because how you look makes you feel confident it makes you feel like you could take on the world and survive you know, feeling healthy in your old age you can see your kids and your grand kids go to college and have amazing experiences like that's the stuff that makes like life awesome like a pair of jeans like is it the real goal? The goal is to make life awesome and that includes eating amazing food you know and not being in social situations where you can't eat like a normal person or being able to travel the world and you know just because there's rice there you should be able to eat it you know, like just cause it's a car so you know the real goal here is to just strip away all the unnecessary stuff about health and all the should zx and you know probably is and maybe nate laters and just get down in that like what makes your life really good and like how can you optimize that happiness and optimize the way you eat and optimize the way you live in the way you exercise too get to that point that like cathartic point were like that's pretty darn good like I can eat out whenever I wanted and like I know how to do it like I can eat whatever I like and I still feel good in the morning I still feel good after a weekend even it's a big even if it's a big weekend even if it was you know your birthday weekend or something you can still feel good on monday because you know you have that under control so that's that's the goal here life should be awesome and it shouldn't suck s o yeah so again dieting is mentally physically and most importantly emotionally exhausting like we talked about when gain it back socially isolating very very essentially isolating doesn't I only want to have six areas I feel like I haven't is that we heard from anyone else yeah well um you want to share um well it's funny I've had the same slim fast experience it's really interesting I remember being young and my mother making it and you know, kind of going on from there and now at this point in my life I'm all about eating organic and sustainable and things like that and it's still isolating actually yeah, because friends want to go out to dinner and I'm like I'm not eating okay I'm still kind of in that dieting place basically we'll talk about that to me I can be really tough you know, really, really tough um and yeah, we talked about again like that the low self esteem that comes from just failing all the time and you know it's not just it's not just like you feel bad like you wish you could do better but there's also I feel like this issue of there's like this cultural shame that comes with health because it's like everybody just feels like you should have had this handled like health is so important like how could you not have this handled right like it's an important thing come on, eat better you know as if it's like all your fault like as if you don't care is if you're not trying you know and it's like like that that shame is just it doesn't do anybody any good what does that make you do? Probably it makes you like curl up in a little ball need a bag of chips right? So it's really really counterproductive and looking at it that way is just like it like it's your fault because the system you've been given to get healthy is broken and doesn't work is the worst so don't diet guys wear we're not dieting anymore um and here's a few of the reasons just to recap so your will power is limited got that not gonna last very long last for a little while and it will inevitably break down so that's one thing I always want you guys to ask yourselves a cz we go through the course is when I think of doing a new habit when I think of do like adding something new to my regiment is it will power base and will it always be willpower based? You know, because there is and there is actually some use for willpower there can be some good uses for willpower that we'll discuss but I mean one of them is setting up the habits in the first place but it shouldn't be about like depriving yourself it should be about, you know, forcing yourself at the beginning to start to try new things until you figure out what worse so this is this one was one of the hardest most for me personally too internalize but dieting weight makes weight loss harder not easier and I can't tell you even people who read my blood for years everyone so well the email means like I really believe you but gosh I'm struggling and I really want to go back to dieting and it is so important to remember that that puts you backwards that you're wasting energy you're wasting time you're wasting social options to have fun versus suffer and it's tempting I know how tempting it is because we do get those quick results but it's not the way to go e and make sure livestock which by the way is very different from making your life awesome so it's unacceptable and um so yeah again I went when you think about you the will power you do have any it could be very powerful in this as we go through you'll see there will be times you will need a little bit of will power but when you stop dieting you free up a tremendous amount of willpower because that makes sense like you're spending all this energy trying to not eat things you want and trying to you know, force yourself to do all these things that are hard um but that you know most of those things don't work so let's instead redirect that energy to stuff that actually does work awesome says if you have any questions from the online community we've got lots of questions lots of people are really charming in a different way comments acceptable reader couple tio female hormones gone wild that's a great name she says we have to learn to tune into ourselves learn to tailor our own needs and loan what our personal history psychology is about food or medical history, et cetera and develop something that works for each of us as individuals I'm sure that's something that resonates with you daria yeah absolutely you know yeah on global do said they've set a goal they think actually weighed around six hundred pounds s so they don't know they said say wait but this is I don't fit in theater seats I'm having to buy two seats on the airplane I don't cut of theme parks closer huge costs s o to do away with those why I want to lose weight I've actually already lost one hundred seventy five pounds in the last two years wow, but I'm still nowhere near where my goals are when I get to the point I can buy one seat ticket affordably to see my cunt family across country I know it's been worth of that is a great story thanks on good luck with your journey good luck with your journey and I mean I mean round of applause for losing one hundred seventy pounds um I don't know like three stories well, no, no it's really mean a headache? I mean, I've gone to the place where I I've been busy haven't been able truly to take the time you could find something to eat and I can feel a headache coming on and I'm wondering what that's all about because I've had some other people say we want to just eat well yeah, I'm busy I've got actually go get the food yeah, I know that's a great question so often that actually has to do with water you're probably dehydrated so water can help with that tremendously I was one of those when I was a kid I inevitably got a headache an hour before dinner and I'd be like mom headache and she'd be like dinner's coming and it would fix it, but in my adult life I've noticed water helps a lot we will also talk about having emergency snacks to tide you over it gets through the meal so you aren't suffer because you should never actually sit down to a meal completely starving that's a recipe for destruction so go yes, you probably touch on this later, but I was just thinking about detoxing and you consider something like, uh the master cleanse something like that is that considered dieting? Oh that's definitely a diet we will talk about dieting mythology tomorrow yes, so my what the hell moment is usually around the time I get my period and I know if if you guys experience this no, but I'm like right before I get in a period that the week before I crave like fries and chips and chocolate and everything and it's like I go overboard and I know it's, you know, I've read so much about it, and people say, yeah, you have to your liking this vitamins and this stuff, but nothing ever help for me, and I don't know if it's because I never like like to belong to this habit of eating the right food, so I don't know like it's like I'm out of control, you know, it's funny um the science is mixed on this, so science says no, no, no, you ladies are crazy has nothing to do with your hormones. I've read studies to say this and I'm like, hell, no that's not true, I get I get like, I've got this stuff like I'm really focused on this stuff all the time and and I definitely noticed that, but what I can do is give you some strategies to minimize the damage and but also relieve some of the guilt because you don't have to be perfect all the time because once you have a system where you're in it's just like sort of comes along on autopilot and like takes care of itself those little deviants is they're not that big of a deal yes your thoughts on restricting foods for like a specific health condition do you like do you agree with that us earlier disagree yeah so this is a really important point everybody is different like what works for me I tell people this all the time what works for me isn't necessarily going to work for you or anybody else I mean some people do much better on you know with more meat for instance some people have very low tolerance for me and that's something like that science you know science could never tell you what worked for you so and yes when you have a specific medical condition I mean yeah you need to be working with your doctor and like talking because there's things that are very very particular so yeah that's not at all like I don't consider that a diet that's like that's that's medicine okay, yeah this has been a really incredible first section I mean just to be rethinking the whole way we way approach dieting and weight loss and then the way we think about it on busting that myth of willpower I think that's been fascinating so far but we've got a lot more to come one of the untold about our next segment healthy style inhabit I think it's what everybody wants to talk about which is habits. And how do you actually have them? Because it's really hard to see how we'll be discussing health style, which is the word I used to replace diets you touched earlier on how there were diet is tricky, right? Because it also means just the things you eat. Exactly. So I have a new word. We'll talk about that, and then also howto build all those habits that we all want so desperately.