How to Reset Dietary Beliefs
Article by Stefan Burns - Updated July 2022. Join the Wild Free Organic email newsletter!
There exist hundreds of popular dietary protocols, each diet having a hallmark distinction. The paleo diet advocates you as our paleolithic ancestors did 10,000 years ago, which means no processed foods. The vegan diet eschews all animal products, from meat to honey. Whole30 cuts out added sugars, beans/legumes, alcohol, dairy, and grains. As much as these diets might seem different from each other, they all are the same in one respect, they restrict and limit your food choices. If you want to break the viscous cycle of lose weight → gain weight → lose weight→ gain weight then a different mindset is needed.
Many individuals have great success following the paleo, vegan, or Whole30 diets, even though the foods that are allowed to be eaten vary dramatically. And for some this new diet fits their lifestyle and they are able to remain permanently at a healthier weight. For most though, dietary restriction only works in the short term. In the long term, it has consistently been shown that 80-95% of dieters who lose significant amounts of weight regain the weight they lost months later (1). In fact, almost everyone who has dieted before has experienced life-changing weight loss at one time or another.
When foods are restricted and activity levels increase, dramatic short term changes in body composition and health can be achieved, but during the diet, psychologically it’s like a rubber band being slowly being pulled back more and more.
Once the rubber band can stretch no one, and the initial goal of twenty, thirty, or fifty pounds lost is achieved, dieters let their discipline slip and reintroduce the foods they crave back into their diet. The rubber band snaps back. A small reward for a job well done becomes a binge, and then snowballs back into old dietary habits. Dieters didn’t break their sugar addiction or eating disorder, they created a temporary bubble where they put bad habits on pause, and then the bubble popped.
If the psychology of dieting isn’t addressed, then most diets will end in failure.
Inclusion > Exclusion
When a new diet, habit, or lifestyle practice is started, the first thought might be to conceptualize all the foods, bad habits, and environmental factors that will be cut out of your current life in order to improve your health and wellness.
On the surface, this appears good. Undoubtedly there are many things can be damaging to your health in excess, and eliminating them from your life can be a huge step forward.
The issue is, exclusionary ideologies do not take into account human behavior or psychology. Humans are not machines or robots. To permanently change your dietary mindset, it is imperative to switch to a mindset of inclusion rather than exclusion. As omnivores, we evolved with digestive systems that are capable of digesting most any food.
To heal a damaged dietary psychology or food disorder, the first step that needs to be taken is for all the foods of the world to be made available and OKAY to eat to the dieter.
Often times, it is the fact that a food is restricted that makes it so appealing. Likewise, and we’ll use the example of ice cream, if ice cream is made off-limits, then once the protocol has been broken, feelings of guilt and shame can compel someone to begin an ice cream binge, which spirals back into their eating disorder. If the ice cream isn’t made strictly off limits (even if it is best to avoid the processed calories), then a bowl of ice cream is much less likely to turn into a binge. Having a bowl of ice cream might not have been the best decision, but it is much better than a binge session fueled by negative emotions. Since the ice cream isn’t odd limits, and the consumption of food comes from a place of self love rather than self hate, feelings of guilt, shame, or self loathing never manifest. With personal growth and patience, you can empower yourself to skip the ice cream or eat something else entirely, even if the ice cream is allowed.
Empower Yourself to Eat Healthier Foods
To elevate beyond the junk food, practicing a inclusive diet is much more powerful when we examine healthy foods. Take the following example:
Let’s say you have a goal to reduce your processed grains consumption, and now it’s dinner time. On your plate you have a baked potato, chicken breast, and bread. You notice that there are no green vegetables.
If your goal is to reduce processed grains consumption, there are two ways to approach the issue.
The first is to totally exclude the bread and test your discipline. The second option is to simply add an additional healthy food to the meal. For example, add some salad greens and make sure to eat the salad greens before the bread. By doing using this method, the bread isn’t banned, but rather selected against. Overtime habits like this will become second nature, and overall food quality eaten day to day will improve.
When following inclusive dietary practices, time is given to the dieter to make the health connections they need to understand in order to fix the underlying problem. In this example, this person realizes when they eat bread, they don’t feel well, experience big energy swings, and have poor digestion. Once realized, why would they want to eat bread?
By practicing mindfulness and the gradual reduction of trouble foods, these connections between trouble foods and negative physiological effects are made possible. Once the connection is made, it’s no longer a question of willpower to not eat something, it’ll be a decision that is consciously made and stuck with.
With an inclusive mindset, unhealthy foods can initially be used to encourage healthy food behaviors. If these inclusive principles are structured right, lasting healthy food behaviors can be established. As healthier foods start to make up a majority of the diet, taste-buds will change and now junk food once desired becomes gross and overly sweet.
You might have noticed this strategy is one that many parents will use with their kids to encourage them to eat their vegetables. “You can’t have your dessert until you finish your vegetables!” For old or young minds alike, this strategy works.
One of the caveats to this method is that food allergies and intolerances should be strictly avoided. It is possible to reverse a food allergy and/or intolerance, but it takes a significant amount of time, as the gut needs to heal many times over and the immune system needs to completely forget the trigger it learned and become non-reactive to those food proteins. For allergies or intolerances, it will take many months if not years for these issues to possibly be resolved.
Food Frequency: Weekly vs Daily
Another important aspect of any diet is food frequency. Everyone has their stable foods they enjoy, and the depending on what someone eats in a day, their calories, macronutrients (fats, carbs, protein), fiber, vitamins, and minerals can vary dramatically.
When considering starting a new diet, often macronutrient and micronutrient goals are established. For example, a new diet could dictate the following:
Macronutrient Ratios:
35% fats
40% carbohydrates
40 grams fiber daily
25% protein
Micronutrients:
100% RDA magnesium, calcium, potassium, zinc
100% RDA B-vitamins (B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12)
2000-5000 IU Vitamin D
100% RDA vitamins A, C, E, K
If using a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal, it can satisfying hitting macronutrient and micronutrient targets daily, but what happens is overtime discipline wanes and it becomes harder and harder to hit exact macronutrient targets. Or maybe you hit your protein target early in the day through protein heavy meals. Later in the day, in order to stay “in range”, all protein must be avoided. Having a healthy unprocessed meal without any protein is difficult, but it sure is easy with a large bowl of ice cream! Macronutrient tracking certainly can be effective, but it also create situations at times when it is okay binge on junk food because macros must be met.
For micronutrients, things get even trickier. When trying to hit exact micronutrient targets everyday, it is very difficult to get every exact micronutrient to 100% daily with a healthy diet composed primarily of unprocessed foods
Supplements then can be seen as the answer, with certain supplements needing to be taken on certain days to bump everything to 100%. You can use protein shakes, ice cream, and supplements to hit macronutrient and micronutrient targets, but is the diet healthy or sustainable?
“For a diet, when macronutrients and micronutrients are the priority, and not the consumption of whole organic unprocessed foods, it is still possible for food quality to decrease while being within the parameters of the diet”
For further illustrate the point, let’s use magnesium. Magnesium is the second most common micronutrient deficiency worldwide, a master micronutrient used in hundreds of chemical reactions and cellular tasks. Clearly it’s important to get enough magnesium, and in the context of a holistic diet, which do you think is better? A magnesium supplement, or eating a 1/4 cup of pumpkin seeds? Both with provide 200 mg of magnesium, but the bioavailability of the magnesium in pumpkin seeds will be much greater, while also providing unique phytochemicals, helpful health benefits, and satiating fiber, protein, and fat. The supplement won’t come with calories, but the bioavailibility will be lower, and the fillers it is combined with is questionable. You need calories to survive, so don’t shun calories from health foods so you can indulge in junk foods.
Macronutrient ratios and micronutrients are lower priority than eating for health, longevity, and wellness. When eating a well-rounded diet from a variety of whole unprocessed foods, macronutrient and micronutrient targets might not be achieved everyday. The mindset of hitting targets daily can be very limiting, but thinking of hitting targets on a weekly time schedule is very liberating. This is especially true in the context of the modern agricultural system, where quality and nutrition of the same foods have been declining for decades. Think depleting soil nutrients, increased pesticide and dangerous herbicide usage, monoculture farms, etc.
The body is able to store glycogen, fat, amino acids, and micronutrients (2). On some days ratios or RDAs might vary from the weekly target, but over a week long period, everything typically will come into balance. Additionally, with a weekly mindset, having a treat now and then isn’t “allowed” or “banned” based on macronutrient rations. Instead emotions and energy levels can guide food choices intuitively, an important step towards outgrowing an eating disorder. How you arrive at a desirable outcome is just as important as the outcome itself.
Think and Act Long Term
The journey towards wellness is one of patience. When your health is suffering, it is highly seductive to reach for the solution that promises the quick fix. If it took many years to develop an eating disorder or add 30 pounds of body fat, you cannot expect the fix to be quick. It might take as long to heal as it took to become unhealthy, though typically the journey is shorter by at least a factor of two.
Patience, love, understand, and being at peace with your current situation are the first steps that need to be taken in order to begin the healing process. Until honesty and truth are at the forefront of your wellness journey, expect to yo-yo between progress and setbacks.
Mindfulness is one of the most powerful tools available at your disposal. Bring conscious awareness to your actions and the decisions and you’ll be surprised by how fast things can accelerate when setbacks no longer occur.
Develop a long term mindset, and instead of eliminating your worst food offenders, incentivize the healthy foods, making sure to include those first into your day. Before you realize it, you’ll be past any prior plateaus you struggled with accelerating towards your long term health goals!
References
Wing RR, Phelan S. Long-term weight loss maintenance. Am J Clin Nutr. 2005;82(1 Suppl):222S-225S.
James Collier. Storage of Micronutrients in the Body. Dietetics
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