The "Conversation" to have with your BODY before you start a Diet
A note before reading: This article is part 3 of 5 in the article series “The Conversations to have before starting a diet".
To read part 1: “What Constitutes a successful diet” or part 2: "The Conversation to have with YOURSELF before you start a diet" click below:
Let's recap a little bit from parts 1 & 2.
The first thing to do when setting up this “project” is to get YOURSELF on board. Let’s say that as the project manager you have successfully done the following things from the previous article:
Found your purpose (the "WHY") of your diet
Formulated a realistic, but challenging GOAL
Researched to form a strategy for HOW you are going to diet
Devoted TIME towards planning so the strategy can be executed
Perfect, you have checked all of your boxes so far. You have had the first "conversation" with your team, but now it’s time to talk to:
Your Body
Motivation to diet is at an all-time high, you’re prepped and ready to go. You start dieting. By week five, nothing is going as expected. You are tired, hungry, and have lost motivation. You're "why" fades and you end up quitting.
What happened?
The first assumption that I often see with people who fall into this trap, is that it all comes down to a lack of motivation, willpower or proper planning.
The person will beat themselves up because they didn’t think they were “disciplined enough” to start dieting. The person may even start to demonize ENTIRE food groups such as sugar because once they got into the diet, sugary treats and snacks ended up being their downfall.
Their plan to execute the diet could have, in theory, been bulletproof. But because of the failure of the diet, the person will start to irrationally doubt their initial game plan. He or she may even start to question the science behind the process and reject the knowledge acquired through doing their own research. They start saying things like:
"Carbs are making me fat"
"I just didn't have enough willpower"
"I just have a harder time losing fat. So why bother?"
"Counting Macros is pointless"
"I'm special and nothing works for me. I need to find that one special dieting secret"
"I can't lose weight because these processed foods are toxic and messing up my digestion"
This can lead to a vicious cycle of fad diets, self-doubt and unneeded stress that makes them view dieting as something terrible and nearly impossible to do.
The reality is that there is a good chance that your approach was solid. The time investment you made was worthwhile. But you forgot to get the rest of your "team" on-board with dieting.
Therefore, before you start your diet, the next step is for YOU to sit down and talk to YOUR BODY.
Now, as compelling as the philosophical mind/body discussion is, I will keep this primarily to a physiological and psychological level for this conversation. But first, let’s start by talking about homeostasis.
1. Homeostasis=Balance
A definition I found on the web states that homeostasis is
any self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival.
In the simplest sense, it is the fact that your body craves equilibrium and resists change.
This applies to almost any reaction that your body does. If you put your hand in a fire, your body will react by jolting back your hand. This is because you body feels this extreme change in temperature and brings your hand in because it does not want you to get hurt. Getting burned by the fire unnecessarily jeoparadizes your future survival. While this scenario of the body "adjusting to condtitions that are optimal for survival” seems OBVIOUS, the process of dieting may NOT be as obvious.
The Body's survival response to dieting:
Our body has a lot of stress responses that were more beneficial earlier in the evolution of mankind.
The realization of being in a state of less food usually meant to our ancestors that they were in danger of being malnourished and needed to turn on stress responses to survive. For Example:
Hunger: Your body makes you hungry to motivate you to seek out food. In the past, hunger may have actually signaled the threat of starvation and thus needed to evoke a response to get the person to consume food. This is also typically why we crave calorically dense foods. In the shortest time span, they were what would give the body the most energy instantly.
Laziness: In times of less food, and therefore less caloric input, it is beneficial to minimize energy SPENT as well. This is done as an effort to conserve energy incase OTHER stressors came into this environment that threatened survival. This means moving around less and doing less physical activity to be efficient with your energy spent until you are in a state better suited to eat consistently.
Sex Drive: In times of less food, there typically wasn't less food just for YOU, but for your family as well. If you can't produce food for yourself, then it wasn't a safe bet that your potential offspring would be well-fed either. Down regulating sex drive during a time of malnutrition was the body's way of signaling to the individual to NOT reproduce until food is consistently coming in.
Metabolism: Along with being physically efficient, your body can also make you physiologically efficient. Your body can become efficient in the processes required to make you survive to the bare minimums. An example is that often when dieting, your heart rate slows down. This is allows you to spend less energy through less cardiac contractions throughout the day. Your body also stops producing as much HEAT. Keeping warm requires energy and less effort devoted to thermogenesis means more devoted towards keeping you alive.
You can see how detrimental our survival instincts are to a successful diet. Each one of these mechanisms tries to impose its will onto the body to make it HARDER to lose fat.
Hunger: Drives calories to go UP through consumption of food.
Laziness: Makes calories spent go DOWN through less energy spent from physical activity.
Sex Drive: Down regulation of sex hormones makes it harder to lose fat. For example, down regulation of testosterone makes it harder to retain muscle while dieting and thus easier to lose.
Metabolism: Makes calorie spent go DOWN through less energy spent from physiological processes.
Because of the faster “evolution” of our living conditions compared to our own bodies, these “false” signals still evoke a similar stress response today. When eating less calories, we often find that we will still feel hungry as if we will never eat again. In reality our minds understand that if need be, we could easily eat food.
The BODY does not understand the motivation and the purpose of the diet. You being more motivated to start your diet will only help you ignore these stress signals, not downregulate them from happening.
2. keep your body as happy as possible
The last section can be kind of a buzzkill. Knowing that the body adapts to dieting by reversing what you are trying to do is frusturating. This is why, as the project manager YOU need to sit down and have a conversation with YOUR BODY to make sure that it is also on-board to start dieting.
Just because YOU are motivated doesn't mean YOUR BODY wants to diet. Therefore, we need to make sure our body is as happy as possible before we start our diet. When I say start, this also means that if you fail at a diet, you MORE SO need to make sure your body is in a happy state before you start upsetting it again with ANOTHER diet.
Pretend that you and your motivation are something entirely seperate from how your body is feeling. Go into a diet with the assumption that your body doesn't care how motivated you are and will adapt accordingly to the diet based on whatever you give it and what it "feels".
What are some of things that you can plan to incorporate to get your body on-board with the diet?
Consistent Signaling
The body enjoys consistency in signaling. I believe that this concept is the over-arching rule of how to "work" with your body.
If you do certain things over and over again, you form habits. These are rituals and routines that you have done enough over time to where your body recognizes that the habit is here to stay. The key of these consistent signals are that your body starts to turn off its stress response to them and run on autopilot.
For example, if you wake up Monday-Friday at 6AM to go to work you will probably need an alarm at first. Eventually, you may get to a point where sometimes on the weekend, your body naturally wakes up right around 6AM even though you don't have work. This is because you told your body enough times to wake up at 6AM that eventually it naturally does it. This example of consistent signaling is called circadian rhythm.
Before starting a diet, your body receives an "input" of food each day. This input of food is hypothetically relatively the same day to day, week to week. Perhaps higher on some days and lower on others. If anything this input of food does NOT correlate with being in a calorie deficit in this scenario.
What happens when you change the input? If you do it quick, fast, and often enough, your body will "catch" on to what's happening.
For example:
Let's look at what happens when you play fetch with a dog. Everyone at some point has faked out their dog by not throwing the ball and keeping it in their hand.
The first time it happens, your dog usually goes for it. If you do it again right after, chances are your dog might go for it again. Keep doing this over and over, eventually your dog catches on and doesn't respond.
YOUR BODY is the dog in this case.
YOU are the person throwing the ball.
Whether or not the dog goes for the ball is analogous to YOUR BODY responding to the diet.
Over the course of time, you want to be able to get your dog to go for the ball.
What are some of the circumstances that will make the dog go for the ball more times than not? In other words, what are some of the circumstances that will let your body respond to the diet predictably so that we can execute our plan?
Minimize Diet Fatigue before starting
Analogy: The easiest time to get your dog to go for the ball is the very FIRST time you fake it out in a while.
In Dieting: the easiest time to start dieting is when you haven't done it in a long time.
For a period of time, it is important for you to signal to your body that it is getting a sufficient amount of calories and nutrients by eating normal. The longer you give it this stream of signaling, the longer it will take for the body to fight back when you start dieting. This is because you are essentially "teaching" your body that there is no reason to panic or fear.
Extended period of not dieting tells your body that it is not starving and there is no reason to evoke a stress response.
Potential Roadblocks: Often I will see people fail diets and start another one right after. This is a problem. Every consecutive time you diet afterwards is essentially spinning your wheels.
The body will reject the process of dieting the more often and prolonged you diet.
On one end, someone who has never tried restricting their diet in any manner may be very primed to start a diet. Someone who has been dieting for 6 consecutive months with barely any breaks along the way is going to have a body that is fighting back hard.
I suggest that before you start your diet, you should take a period of time to eat at maintenance to signal to your body that you are in a fed state.
incorporate diet breaks
Analogy: When playing with your dog, it may start to catch-on about your trick. Actually throwing your dog the ball every now and then may de-sensitize it from the trick.
In Dieting: When dieting for a bit of time, take "diet breaks" to reverse some of the negative effects while dieting and pace yourself for longer term success.
The longer you diet, the higher the levels of food focus, hunger, laziness and overall resentment towards dieting.
You need to take a break.
Taking predictable and structured diet breaks are the mind's way of reminding the body that is is not in a state of actual starvation. The less you have to deal with the negative symptoms that come with dieting, the more efficient you can sustainably diet.
Potential Roadblocks: You may start off a diet fresh and have the right gameplan, discipline and habits to see some serious progress. Hitting a wall at some point is inevitable.
Instead of taking a break from dieting, I've seen people try to push through these walls and end up rebounding badly.
Not to mention, I've seen people consciously take diet breaks, but have no gameplan or structure during them. This leads to mindless eating and some guilt associated with what has happened.
What I do is plan in structured diet breaks:
Eat at maintenance calories for 4-7 days for every 3-5 weeks of dieting.
For every 2-4 dieting phases, I try to plan in an entire period to eat at maintenance.
For these next points, I will use the same analogy
Analogy: The better you are at "deception" in throwing the ball, the more your dog will believe it. You can do a host of tricks such as using different arm angles and throwing motions.
In Dieting: The better you are at structuring your diet to make your body feel as if it isn't dieting, the more success you will have.
control Hunger
Even during a diet, it is important to maintain this happy relationship with your body. On an obvious sense, eat foods that are satiating and nutrient dense to help minimize signals of hunger. Get ample sleep and try and manage stress in situations not related to the process of dieting.
I hate to use the word, but this is almost like your mind is “tricking” your body.
Your mind is setting the diet up such that the tradeoff of calorie deficit evokes the highest signals of satiation and intake of energy as possible. The key is to give your body as little reason as it needs to be hungry, tired or fatigued, while still getting your result.
Here's a list of the top principles that I believe help the most with hunger while dieting:
Higher Protein Intake
Higher Vegetable Intake
Getting Good Quality Sleep
Prioritize Wholesome, Fibrous Carbohydrate Sources
Diet "Tricks"
Other subconscious diet “tricks” can revolve around this fact of continuous signaling.
For example, when not dieting I usually eat an apple on my morning commute to work after the gym. My body is accustomed to some item of sweet food into my mouth around 7AM every day in my work week. When dieting, instead of completely cutting out the apple, I’ll just eat a piece of gum on my commute. This way my routine still includes something “sweet” that I chew on with my mouth around this time 5 days a week. This serves as just another way with creating a calorie deficit, but not letting your body stress out because most of the signaling stays the same.
This is also why diet foods and cookbooks are so popular. Eating diet ice cream for potentially half the calories and 70% of the taste makes your body feel as if nothing is wrong.
This is also why foods like vegetables work so well for dieting. Vegetables are very low in calories per unit weight. This means that they will take up more room in your stomach with not a ton of calories. A more distented stomach helps with controlling hunger signals to the brain.
The average serving of Peanut Butter is 34g in weight which ~ 200 calories.
34g of Broccoli, on the other hand, only has ~ 10 calories.
You would have to eat around 1.3 POUNDS of Broccoli to eat 200 calories worth of it.
takeaway
You now know:
What constitutes a successful diet
How YOU impact its success
How YOUR BODY impacts its success
You are responsible for:
Motivation: Finding out your "why" to diet
Preparation: Finding out how to plan your diet
You also need to keep your body happy through:
Minimizing Diet Fatigue
Utilizing Diet Breaks
Hunger Management
In Part 4, I will talk about how YOUR ENVIRONMENT is the last variable in this equation. You can be motivated to diet and have a solid plan ready to execute. You can start off in a state of minimal diet fatigue while incorporating diet breaks along the way. But what happens when friends want to go out to dinner? Or if you have a spontaneous trip planned? Or if people tease you for being on a diet? More to come...