Why Diets May Not Work

At the time of lose weight, many people rely on diet as one more component of the small daily rituals that must be followed to have the desired body. At some point, some of these people will decide to stop pretending they are meeting their chart goals. weekly feeding and will return to embrace with total honesty a life devoted to carbohydrates and food garbage.

Others, however, will be able to follow the diet until they discover, months later, that not only has it not worked for them but that they have also gained weight. Why is this happening? Traci mann, from the University of Minnesota, explains part of this mystery in his book Secrets from the Eating Lab: the science of weight loss, the myth of willpower, and why you should never diet again.

Not everything is meeting tables

The title of the book may seem very forceful, but the truth is that Mann does not suggest that she does not give the same what she eats. Evidently It is not the same to eat a diet based on industrial pastries and pizzas than to stick to an eating plan in which legumes

, nuts and fruit make up 80% of what is eaten. What the psychologist is actually suggesting is that diets are ineffective on their own, because they don't They contemplate psychological strategies to lose weight: they only indicate the raw material that must be use.

Actually, this doesn't sound far-fetched. If we think of diets as if they were a kind of product to buy and apply directly, we are probably doing the latter wrong, by giving diet the power to make us lose weight and bypass everything the rest. Specifically, we will be overlooking the mechanisms of self-control that we should be using and the absence of which can blind us to continual failure to follow good food planning.

Traci Mann says that in order to understand why diets are not effective, we must first recognize that each person has a different way of assimilating food, and that the latter is largely determined by our genetics.

Many people tend to create large layers of fat, and the opposite is true with others.. Thus, the human body does not have a "center" to naturally tend to, because we are all different. When a person tries to lose weight to get closer to that fictitious "center point", her body feels unbalanced and she makes an effort to adapt to the new situation.

One of the side effects of this struggle to adjust to a lower calorie diet is stress. The body tries to keep us on our toes and look for new sources of calories, which encourages, as might be expected, more trips to the fridge.

Diets take our usual eating habits and subtract them, but it does not contemplate the compensatory exercise that our body does to counteract with small daily sums such as snacking between hours. In the end it is possible that with the diet we are eating both the foods that this meal plan offers us and the occasional snacks that stress generates us and that we are able to overlook or undervalue, without realizing that we only eat so much between meals since we begin to impose a certain type of daily menu.

It's useless to think about willpower

Another of the ideas of the book is that it is not practical to make one of the fundamental elements in complying with the diet to be the willpower. Mann believes that willpower has been mythologized into a kind of agent whose role is to command the rest of the body, as if it had power over it.

However, this idea of ​​"willpower" becomes irrelevant when we realize that no component of our body is capable of giving orders unilaterally, without receiving pressure from the rest of the body. organism. Specifically, Mann believes that this concept only exists to have something to blame when something doesn't work. It is something like the hole under the carpet in which what is not convenient to explain is hidden.

To do?

A useful theoretical model to explain our relationship with diet is one that does not depend on such an abstract idea as willpower and that accepts that we must put limits on the pretense of losing weight if you do not want to lose in health, due to the role our genes play. Thus, each person should focus on achieving a tolerable point of thinness, but no more.

From there, the point is to control the quality of what you eat, but to focus more on following strategies so as not to fall into an unacceptably high carb temptation. These strategies can trust almost nothing to willpower, since it will bend in favor of adaptive mechanisms dictated by genetics.

What Mann proposes is to pursue goals that indirectly take us away from tempting caloric intakes.

Part of these strategies are purely psychological, such as substituting thoughts about a cake for others that feature whole wheat bread or a food with even less carbohydrates. Others, however, are related to materially changing our environment. For example, hiding or throwing away junk food in the house, or blocking access to this food. In this way, the desire for carbohydrate food will be overtaken by another trend that is also very human: the laziness of going to look for food. They are all benefits!

Bibliographic references:

• Mann, T. (2015). Secrets from the Eating Lab: the science of weight loss, the myth of willpower, and why you should never diet again. New York: HarperWave.