Is This Surprising Factor Sabotaging Your Diet?

 

Welcome to the 24th episode of Vegetarian Health and Longevity from Hurry The Food Up and Sports Nutritionist James LeBaigue.

There’s a recurring theme that I see when working 1:1 with clients and with members of The Vegetarian Protein Fix.

Typically, they have struggled to stick to a diet over the long term. They might have been able to for a couple of months, even 6 months before old habits creep back in, and before they know it, they’re back where they started.

There might be lots of reasons for this. They don’t have enough time and life gets busy. Work was stressful. They had an injury. They went on holiday.

There are loads of “problems” that have stopped them and made it difficult.

But usually, when I speak to them and delve into this there’s something deeper, something darker that is keeping them from sticking to their diet over the long term, and I think it’s something that so many people struggle with.

And if more people were able to understand this and improve it, I am sure that it would benefit so many lives. Now this could be about weight loss or just general healthy living because it’s something that crosses all spheres and walks of life.

I’d like to dive into this in this episode and show you just how powerful this change can be and how you can use it in your own life.

Listen to it here on your favorite provider.

My experience

Throughout my time working clinically in family medicine, and as a nutritionist within sport, I’ve come across so many different attitudes to food and dieting.

Some people are so carefree around food and have no emotional attachment to it, going as far as to forget to eat, and not eating enough unless they have a specific plan to follow.

Others love food and enjoy all different aspects of it, and don’t have any concerns about weight or managing their diet. Others love food but hate their diet: they often feel ashamed, and guilty, and they aren’t where they want to be in terms of their weight or how they look.

Suffice it to say that there are so many different perceptions of food and it’s such a complicated matter, but apart from a small group of people, everyone has an area that they could benefit from working on.

You see, there’s something that many people don’t think about when it comes to food.

Focusing on the wrong thing?

People often focus on the nutritional value of food, and I’m guilty of it too. I talk about calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat, vitamins and minerals, and the quality of the food that you’re eating.

People connect what they eat to their weight in either a positive or negative light, with it either helping or hindering them to reach their goals.

But very few people that I’ve come across in my time truly have what I would call a good relationship with their food. Where they not only understand the nutritional content and context of their food but also enjoy the various aspects of it like pleasure on an individual level, on a social level, and how it can support them with their endeavors.

And this is something that I think many people would benefit from improving because it can honestly transform someone’s life.

The perceived problem with your diet

When people struggle to stick to their diet, they’ll often give me a reason like “I was a bit too busy to plan my food” or “Work was stressful and I couldn’t stick to my diet”.

While these might well be problems that they are facing, these are just the symptoms and the result of their diet either not being sustainable or not having controlled enough of the factors that can ruin adherence.

Commonly, they’re skipping over the part which is important because they are just focused on this end goal metric of “Am I following my diet”.

So while they think their problem is that they don’t have enough time or that work is too stressful, the issue runs much deeper.

What often happens is that they get into a negative cycle. They end up eating food that they don’t want to, sweets, treats, and highly processed ready meals that are of low nutritional value, and this in turn makes them feel bad. They feel bad about their diet, and about themselves, and weight gain is common in this phase.

So they get into a vicious circle where things aren’t going well and they end up continuing to eat poorly, which spirals things further. Food is an ever-constant that they can’t get away from.

Then at some point, they might decide to try again. They summon the willpower to tackle it again, to cut out all that “bad” food that’s causing problems.

This is a harmful cycle to be in because you’re in a constant negative state towards yourself and, perhaps more importantly, to food. Food is essentially seen as an evil thing that’s causing the problem, rather than something which has so much wonderful value, both nutritionally and on an individual level.

The actual problem

And this is where many people are focusing on the wrong thing. They are looking at the result, which is adherence to the diet and, depending on your goal, weight loss.

But rather than thinking about that, I would strongly encourage people to work on the way they think about food and start fostering a positive relationship with it.

Now this might sound a bit airy… What am I talking about here? What does this mean?

Ok, let’s go back a moment. I mentioned that food is a constant that you can’t get away from. It can be hard to stop thinking about it and it’s hard to separate the negative association, especially when you aren’t reaching your goals. And this is true from the sense that you need the energy from food to keep you alive, so it’s not like you can just ignore it and it goes away.

But if you think about food in a bad light this can be incredibly overwhelming because you come into contact with food so many times throughout the day, so you’re being exposed to it multiple times.

And while food might be part of the issue in terms of your weight or body image, it’s not the actual cause, in the sense that food is just an inanimate object that doesn’t move or have feelings.

You are the one who has the feeling towards food, and how you think about it can have such a significant effect on both your life and your weight

So how do you change this?

I worked with a 1:1 client who had a bad history when it came to food. They were a normal weight throughout their 20s, but by 35 and after kids they had put on a lot of weight, would binge eat, and then try to lose weight, and this happened several times.

When I spoke to her it was clear that she had a very negative association with food. She would say she frequently ate “bad food” even though she tried hard not to, and it often made her feel guilty and ashamed for doing so.

She didn’t like to talk to her family about it because it made her feel very emotional.

Instead of focusing directly on weight loss, which was her goal, we started working on improving little parts of her diet at a time.

Initially, this meant talking about foods that she genuinely enjoyed, both ones that were classically healthy and unhealthy. So this included things like sweets, treats, and then other foods like gnocchi and bread.

Is food Good or bad?

In her mind, all of these things fell into the bad category because she felt like they were the cause of her weight gain. We talked through this, about calories, moderation, and how, if we set her diet up correctly, these things could be included and she could still lose weight.

This was a bit of a mind-blowing suggestion to her. She could eat the foods that she enjoyed, that she found fun but had always associated them with weight gain, but lose weight?

Little by little, we added more fruits, vegetables, and wholegrain carbohydrates into her diet, less high-fat dairy and more low-fat dairy, while including those things that she enjoyed.

Along with that, I was really careful to emphasize that she could enjoy meals out with friends and family, she could go to a coffee shop and eat cake and it was OK.

I remember how her perspective of food completely changed over a couple of months. She no longer saw food as the enemy, and instead, something that was integral to her life that could bring happiness from a personal perspective but also be used towards her goals.

She shifted her mindset to one where food was actively helping her with her goals rather than being something that would detract from them.

And when you think about it, it is true. When it comes to weight management, whether that’s weight gain, loss, or maintenance, calories are the determining factor for how well you achieve that. Realistically, you can eat any food within that if it’s in your calorie budget, so food and calories are simply tools.

For weight loss

And if you look at the research, there’s plenty to suggest that cultivating positive relationships with food can be beneficial, especially in terms of weight loss.

Sure, there are some nuances here and one of the things my client worked hard on was gradually improving her diet with the addition of more of the classically healthy things.

It didn’t just happen overnight and was instead something she had to continually optimize over months, but knowing that she had power over her food was an incredibly empowering revelation for her.

Food is not the enemy

Now some people find this a really hard thing to come to terms with because they have always thought of food as the enemy. The truth is that it isn’t and, honestly, how you perceive food, how you choose to eat, is the issue.

That might sound like doom and gloom but it isn’t. What you need to know is that you have control over food. You can master it and you can change the way you think about it, and if you start seeing it in a more positive light then it can melt away all the negativity that you might be encountering daily.

A nice way to do this is to come at this from the approach of “What can I add, rather than subtract, to make this healthier?”.

If you start from the basis of adding food rather than removing it, it changes the viewpoint. If you’re removing food it’s because it’s “bad”, but if you’re simply adding to it you’re creating something healthier and the association is positive.

Now of course it isn’t quite as straightforward as this and there still has to be balance, but this is where moderation comes in.

Especially at the start, and if you’re struggling to change habits, I have found it so much more helpful to encourage clients to have those guilty-pleasure foods, for lack of a better term, in small amounts, more regularly, than to restrict them, really pine for them, and then binge because they have got to breaking point.

And if the rest of the diet is balanced in terms of calories then you can still achieve your goal, it’s just knowing how the guilty-pleasure foods fit into your calorie budget for the day.

Now all of this is something I go into in more detail in Episode 7 of this podcast, called “What’s The Best Diet For Long Term Weight Loss? Diet Myths Explained”.

I debunk some of the common misconceptions around weight loss and diets, and what I go through there will help you put things into perspective with today’s episode.

So I hope you found this episode useful. If you did, then please give the podcast a quick review on whatever platform you’re listening on.

It helps the podcast to spread to more like-minded people like you, and it’ll only take a moment. Thanks so much, and we’ll speak soon.

And finally, here is the easiest way to sign up to try our meal plans (free).

And a list of our vegetarian meal plans (all also free).

And finally: More vegetarian podcasts this way!