The Impact of Diet Culture.

Now don’t get me wrong, any diet that is going to push fruit, vegetables, lean meats, whole grains, healthy fats, I am game for listening to their why. The issue with diet culture is they create unrealistic, non-sustainable, aggressive claims to providing quick weight loss. The issue with this quick weight loss? 95% of individuals who participate in diet culture and lose weight, gain the weight they lost back, and more. But why? Diets and cleanses such as Weight Watchers, Noom, Atkins, Prolon, and many more are created for you to fail.

Read that again, these diets are created to set you up to fail.

But why would programs endorsed my many famous celebrities, doctors, even some dietitians, be conditioned for failure? The hard answer? To make money. If these programs were created for long-term success, they wouldn’t make the profit they do today. Weight loss and cleanse programs are designed to provide instant gratification (short-term weight loss) that are un-sustainable. The program provides you with limited options that are created by their company, mimicking low-calorie diet products.

So, let’s pretend you decide to purchase a cleanse diet. It is promising 5-10 pound weight loss within the first month! How great. You decide you are going on a vacation and you “need” to slim down. Thus, you purchase the plan and adhere to the food options provided. At the end of each day, you are totaling 1,200 calories. Mind you, 1,200 calories is the energy requirements for a 4 year old. A month later, you are down 5 pounds and feeling very low energy, hungry, but happy with the “success”. You decide to keep going with the diet because it is obviously working. 6 months go by and you are down to eating 1,000 calories a day, because the plan has you eating a couple fat loss bars, a frozen meal, and a “healthy” brownie for your daily intake. You have had close to 15-20 pounds of weight loss but are at the point of feeling like you’re in a good spot. So, you decide you no longer need to stay on the diet, you have enough will power and skills to keep the weight off.

Your metabolism has adapted to your energy deprivation. Our metabolism is responsible for turning food and fuel into energy. What contributes to a healthy metabolism? Lean body mass (aka, muscle), balanced hormones, and most importantly, FOOD. When we deprive our body of adequate food to support our hormones and metabolism, our metabolism begins to go into energy saving mode. The energy our body does have, is given to vital functions in our body such as our heart, brain, and lungs. When our metabolism has adapted to a diet, it does not burn energy like it usually does when it is properly fueled in order to serve other vital organs in our body.

Thus, someone who is eating 1,000 calories for a prolonged period of time now has a metabolism that has adapted to the extreme caloric deficit. They would have to continue to cut calories to maybe, lose a couple more pounds. Many individuals hit a plateau or even begin to regain weight, even with such a low calorie intake.

But, how can we repair our metabolism after the detrimental impact of years of dieting? We EAT.

Now, I am not saying you have to go gang busters and eat everything in sight! But we focus on rebuilding our metabolism from the ground, up, by providing proper energy throughout the day. We eat whole grains, healthy fats for our hormones, lean meats, fruits, vegetables, legumes. We begin to eat at regular intervals, every 2-4 hours. You will start to notice your body giving you hunger and fullness cues that you ignored for many months.

Many women get scared when I tell them they are eating too little, are not balancing their plate, to then eat every 2-4 hours. When they realize their body is capable of having a minimum of 1,700 calories a day, a light-bulb goes off. They realize they CAN have 3 meals a day and still reach their goals, heal their relationship with their body, and find peace in gentle nutrition.

Diet culture is bull sh*t. Your body is worth more than the strawberries and cream weight loss bar they are prescribing you for breakfast, or the flax crackers with broth they are telling you to eat three times a day.

You are worth more than a diet. You are worth investing in yourself to learn life-long nutrition habits that will bring you happiness, success, and balance all in one. You never need to diet before going to the beach again.

You are worth more than the diet.