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Show Notes
On this episode, I talk about the criteria I think you should have in mind when you select a weight loss diet.
I share some red flags to help you steer clear of diets that can have negative effects on your objective, your long-term weight loss success and even your health.
In the beginning, when your motivation is high, you think that just knowing what to eat will be enough. However, behavior change is not happening just by having the necessary information at your disposal. The right method to change your current habits is what most influence long-term success.
Here is what you will take away from this episode:
- the red flags to help you eliminate restrictive diets or diets that can harm your metabolic rate or health
- the things you should be looking for in a diet and why
- how starting a weight loss program should make you feel
- the place that “behavior change” must have in the overall strategy for attaining your ideal body weight
Learn more about the Nutrityv® Weight Loss Program.
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Transcript
Hi friends! How are you?
It’s been a long time since I last talked to you on the podcast. I had to take a break to complete my behavior change training and revamp my nutrition and weight loss program with all the new information and the new approach. I am so excited to present it to you in a few weeks and start helping more people transform their body, the way they eat and the way they make choices for themselves with a method that actually works and has been proven to work for years and years.
Enough about this for the moment. Today I want to talk to you about how to choose a weight loss diet. Let’s say you have put on some extra weight: you’ve gone though some stressful months or you might believe that as you age you are inevitably putting on weight more easily. It can be 2 kgs, 5kgs or 10kgs – it still applies.
With the plethora of diets out there, you might be wondering which program to follow. How should you start? This is where things can go two ways:
Either you stop at this stage because you imagine you’ll need to give up pizza, pasta and drinking wine and you cannot possibly do that or that there’s no way your children or your husband would want to eat your diet food so you’ll need to plan and prepare two separate meals each time. It all sounds so overwhelming that you give up at this stage.
Or you pick a diet that you heard about: low-carb, keto, low-fat diets or putting yourself in caloric deficit and you go full speed on it. Or maybe you see a nutritionist that in 45 to 60 minutes tries to understand where you are at and devises a complete overhaul of your meal plan that you are expected to implement from day one. Usually it also involves restricting your caloric intake and vague instructions like adding more vegetables and eating less refined carbohydrates. Vague for you as you don’t necessarily know the steps to redesign your current life for this new person to manifest, the one that eats more vegetables and doesn’t eat refined carbs. It looks like it’s all or nothing. Either you can do it or you can’t.
And what happens next is probably that you don’t call your nutritionist next time because you are embarrassed you haven’t managed to follow his or her decent advice. I mean what can be so hard about eating more vegetables?
But change doesn’t happen like that, from one day to the next unless you had an epiphany like a life-threatening diagnosis, which I don’t wish for any of you. Change happens in iterations. It comes in waves of growth and transformation and it is not linear.
When you decide you want to lose weight to look and feel healthier, to have more energy, you usually have a high degree of motivation. And you should leverage that, you definitely should! It’s the time to do research and see which approach is best for you, who do you want to support you, equip yourself with tools and resources you need and talk to your close ones about what you want to achieve.
This initial motivation can also serve to put in place the first habits towards your new self, like for example eating a well-balanced breakfast. Simple and not requiring a lot of work and preparation in the beginning but definitely setting you up for success and increasing your ability to plan and prepare for healthy meals.
You might be thinking: yes, but I want to see results fast, otherwise I don’t believe it is working. You want to go on a diet to quickly lose some kilograms, hoping this will put you on the right track and then you’ll learn to eat healthily from now on.
Here is why this is the wrong approach: restrictive diets, those that make you lose weight in the beginning, will most probably slow down your metabolic rate. Your metabolic rate is the rate at which you burn calories at rest, to maintain the basic body functions like cell processes, breathing and your heart pumping blood. This constitutes 70%, 70% of all the calories you burn in a day. Imagine if you bring this rate down. Let’s say you burn 2,000 calories in a day for all your needs, then the basic body functions will require 1,400 calories. Bringing your metabolic rate down means you’ll use 1000 calories for your body to function instead of 1,400 which means you now need to use up the 400 calories, otherwise they will be stored, mainly as fat. You’ll need to exercise more to use them or eat less. If you go for the last one, you’ll decrease your caloric intake even more.
The other problem with this approach is that it is based on the simplistic idea that if “calories in” are lower than “calories out”, you will lose weight. And it completely ignores all the other determinants of weight management.
For example your microbiome. Very few people and programs talk about the microbiome. Which is the collection of bacteria, fungi, and viruses
that colonize every surface of the human body exposed to the environment. Most of them are found in the gut, in the big intestine. Studies show that your microbiome composition and diversity influence your resistance to weight loss. This means that if we take 2 people with otherwise identical genes, diets and lifestyle, one can be losing weight and the other not because she misses particular strains of bacteria or a particular combination of them.
Other examples are stress, emotional eating, rest, physical activity, toxins, mindset and beliefs about your body and your capacity to change. They can all have an impact on your ability to lose weight.
I wanted to give you some red flags that should warn you against a diet or a program and the reason I think of them as red flags. There are 5 of them.
- Challenges to eat very little compared to what you are eating now. This can switch your body into starvation mode and it will put a break on weight loss in order to keep you alive.
- Banning of foods or macronutrients , like for example the carnivore diet or the keto diet. These diets leave out a lot of nutritious foods and encourage increasing the consumption of certain foods (like meat and saturated fats) to the point it can pose a risk for your health.
- Programs that push you to starve yourself. There is a difference between emotional hunger, when you feel the need for food to calm down an unpleasant emotion, and real hunger. If this is the case for you and you can’t make the difference yet, establishing when exactly you are going to eat can be helpful in the beginning. You should feel real hunger before these times. If you feel it at other times, then ask yourself “What emotion am I feeling? What emotion am I trying to block?” If the diet or program pushes you to ignore your real hunger signals, then it can destabilize your hormones plus it’s a clear sign it is a restrictive diet that has the potential to mess up your metabolic rate.
- Programs that revolve around weight loss supplements or special weight loss meals that you must buy. They appeal to your desire to find a silver bullet for your problem and they are mostly focused on generating profits based on this illusion and hope that you have.
- Programs that seem strange or very far from where you are – right now. Leaving any nutrition analysis aside, the “behavior change” natural law will make it very very difficult for you to sustain such a program. It sets you up for failure, for “giving up” because the method IS NOT right. You are relying on motivation to do a really difficult behavior, a thing that disrupts your normal routine, preferences and choices in a big way. Motivation is unreliable in the long run and on the first day you are low on it, you won’t have the strength to do this difficult thing and you will give up. Then you will question your ability to change, to do hard things and even your willingness to lose weight if it’s so hard. Or you’ll find excuses like “this is not the right time in my life to make this change”. BUT the problem is not that: you are not focusing on the right problem, the actual issue is that you don’t have the right method to change. We change best by feeling good and we change best in increments. We change by gradually increasing our ability to do the hard things. And we change best when we coach our mind, when we think about the higher purpose of why we are doing what we are doing and when we know it’s not linear, if you missed one, two, three days you can still get back at it. It’s a process.
To recap, here are the 5 red flags to watch for when you choose a diet or weight loss program:
- Restricting quantity a lot compared to what you were eating in the beginning and treating calories indiscriminately, for example 200 calories of a coca cola is the same as 200 calories of carrots.
- Banning entire food categories or macronutrients.
- Pushing you to starve and be hungry
- Weight loss supplements or paid, ready-made weight loss meals
- Programs that seem like a huge leap from where you are today or that have strange rules.
Lets talk now about what to look for in a weight loss program
- First, make sure it includes more than the component about food. Weight loss is a puzzle of many pieces and usually, when you tackle one and it’s not working, you put the blame on yourself or your own body and you feel discouraged. Food, microbiome, blood sugar, hormones, food sensitivities, sleep, rest, physical activity, emotional eating and mindset should all be a part of weight loss interventions, ideally. You can choose a program, like the Nutrityv Weight Loss Program, that approaches all of them or you can research each and work on them on your side.
- Second, make sure it is not based on a “big-bang” or, you might call it “all or nothing” approach. For example, from tomorrow on, you need to apply this meal plan, do 30 minutes of exercise 3 times per week and meditate daily to calm your nervous system. The things you need to change should be ordered by their priority (and priorities are different for each person depending on what their factor with the highest potential is or the one that blocks weight loss the most), they should be stacked and implemented incrementally so that they have the time to anchor in your life and replace other, undesired habits in a natural way.
- Thirdly, make sure there is a clear path, a clear line from where you are today to your aspiration. Just serving or communicating information and knowledge is not enough: the program and professional that helps you should offer a plan, a path for you to take action and hold you accountable for it.
- Lastly, you should feel excited about doing those changes, the new way of eating should seem compelling to you. You should be looking forward to eating the new, delicious meals. You should feel energized by the perspective of improving your nutrition. It should be something you can sustain in the long run: think 1, 3, 5 years from now.
I know you might have expected to hear a lot of nutrition concepts or maybe a comparison between the most popular diets, but I wanted to empower you with the things you need in order to analyze and make the choice on your own. And also understand why I think these criteria are important.
I firmly believe that knowing how to change and adopt new habits is AS important as knowing what to eat. It’s like taking action compared to having theoretical knowledge. Knowledge is not power, it is just potential power. If you don’t take action, or to be more precise, if you are not sure about the sequence of steps you need to take to go from point A – where you are today, to point B – your aspiration, and how to adjust and adapt along the way, you are just one more person with a healthy nutritional plan in their inbox or on their desk.
Until next time, I wish you lots of nourishing food. If you want to be informed about the Nutrityv Weight Loss Program, head over to nutrityv.com/work-with-me. I will leave the link in the show notes.
