Health: Why most diets (eventually) fail
“Diets, like clothes, should be tailored to you”
Imagine this scenario: you want to lose weight and get in shape, you go to a professional for help and they give you a diet and exercise program. It sounds easy enough, and you’re getting results! You just have to eat what he told you, sweat a couple of times a week and it should be straight forward.
Except that it isn’t that simple. For how long do you think you can hold this rhythm? Can you hold it for the rest of your life? You can’t get in shape once and expect the new status to stay forever, that’s not how it works.
Let’s also add a new layer to the situation and pretend that your friends are going out to celebrate on your gym day. What this might mean is alcohol, pizza, burgers, snacks, and all the stuff you are supposed to avoid and you know are not good for your health and the goal you’ve set.
What do you do?
Do you give your diet a break and just go for it? How often will that happen though?
Do you decide not to go altogether? Possibly missing out on having a good time?
Do you go and get water with your salad while your friends look at you in a funny way?
These are all real problems (and I’ll go back to those questions later) but are ones that your diet might not take into consideration. Food is a way more complicated topic than just talking about nutrients (although that’s already complicated enough), we aren’t machines and food isn’t just fuel. Humans are complex biological, psychological, social creatures, and if we want to create real change, we need to also study human behavior. We don’t eat nutrients, we eat food that we like, we eat meals, we eat with people, in places, we eat to celebrate, we eat when we are stressed, we eat when we are sad. Food is also comfort, it contains emotions, memories, cultures…
And to make it even more complex, all these parts of ourselves and our lifestyle are interconnected and affect each other. The quantity and quality of sleep we get can affect our cravings, our physical location can limit the type of foods that are available, who we are together with can influence the choices we make.
If what you eat doesn’t take into consideration all of these other factors that make up your lifestyle, if you have to compromise them in order to serve your diet, then it’s not gonna last very long.
Now, going back to our previous questions, the truth is: I don’t have the answers. Or, to be precise, I don’t have the answers for YOU. I can answer those questions for my particular life, most times.
But I can’t tell you what is right for you, for you, I just have more questions:
What do you value more at this moment? Is it human connections or your abs?
How far are you willing to go to reach your goal? How much is “good enough” for you?
What’s the kind of life do you want to live and how do you want your nutrition to be part of it and help support it?
What if, instead of finding the “perfect” diet, we start making small improvements to what you are already doing well right now?
What would be the laziest, easiest habit we can practice that you can implement even on your worst days, that maybe doesn’t take more than 5 minutes, that you can practice for some weeks until you get pretty consistent with it?
Once we’ve mastered that, then we build upon it another habit, and so on until we reach a point where your nutrition is good enough for you at this moment. Let’s keep it simple, we don’t need to complicate things more than it is necessary, more isn’t always better, and adding complexity doesn’t necessarily mean making progress.
The harder and deeper we commit to something, the more everything else will pay the price. So it is important to invest in the clarity of values and priorities before the hard choices come to us. This is like building the foundation of a house, without a strong foundation everything else we build on top can crumble at any moment, and your diet is what’s sitting on top.
Then, after we get clarity of values and priorities we must practice those values through the choices we make, and by doing so we slowly move from clarity to conviction. We move from knowing, to doing, to being. And our nutrition will be just another tool that represents who we are and what we value.
Does food really need to be this complicated?
Maybe, maybe not.
If your goal is limited in time and has a defined endpoint (ex. a specific competition day) then you might just muscle through it and do not need all of this. But if your goal doesn’t have a defined end date, if your commitment needs to be long-lasting, then we need to build strong foundations first.
For most people food isn’t just food, like exercise and sleep, it is a small piece of the puzzle in a bigger picture of who they are. And if we can’t find a place where it fits, it will eventually be discarded.
And of course, if you need assistance, I’m here to help.
