Getting Out of the Dieting Cycle

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Full Episode Transcript:

Getting Out of the Dieting Cycle

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. SO, today’s episode is going to be a little bit different. I typically write out a really detailed outline before I do my podcast and this time, I decided to not do that. So, we are going to be talking about getting gout of the dieting cycle today. So, if you’re having trouble getting out of that dieting cycle, you’ll understand why in this episode. In fact, America in general and really the world in general, haven’t been able to get out of the dieting cycle. So, it’s no surprise that you as the individual may be having difficulty as well.

So, dieting is important to talk about when it comes to eating habits because I have noticed that over the years, the term “dieting” doesn’t necessarily mean something super restrictive and crazy, right? I am going to go through some of the wacky diets that I did see when I was browsing on the internet, just to sort of show you how these are not healthy. And just because it’s kind of interesting to see what society has gone through and see what diets America has come up with over the years.

Then I’m going to show you how to get out of that dieting cycle.

With dieting and eating habits, the one thing I do want to note, is that sometimes the term “diet” refers to just simply what you’re eating. So, diet, doesn’t necessarily have to be this negative fad, restrictive diet. Diet, the term, also just simply means what you’re eating as well. So, you can have a healthy diet. And this doesn’t mean you are restricting and doing things that are extreme for the purposes of drastic weight loss. I just want to differentiate between the two.

The definition that I found that I liked as far as the dieting that I’m referring to in this podcast episode and that people typically refer to, is from the Oxford Dictionary. I looked at several. The Oxford Dictionary says, “restrict oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight.” Okay, so that’s the “diet” that we’re used to as far as the term goes.

There are several diets that I read about that were really quite interesting. Some of these you’ll recognize. The very first popular diet was back in 1863 and this one was named the “Banting Diet” and it was named after William Banting. This was a low-carb, low-calorie diet that caused him to lose significant amount of weight, so he wrote about it to tell others about it. This was one of the earlier ones I found.

Then, in 1888, Dr Salisbury came up with the Salisbury Method. He came up with this one because he thought food was the key to better health and that certain foods would help cure illness. Interestingly though, the foods that he thought you should be eating, I don’t think you’d find very appetizing. He thought meat patties were health foods and that they could cure illnesses.

I think meat is a food that you don’t want to exclude from your diet unless you have reasons for excluding it like if you’re vegan or vegetarian. He thought meat patties could cure Civil War illnesses. He thought fruit and vegetables were BAD for you. This is a backwards way of looking at vegetables and fruit.

In the 1930s, you had the Grapefruit Diet. This was also known as the Hollywood Diet. This consisted of eating a grapefruit at each meal along with some very healthy foods, like protein-rich foods as well as vegetables. Sugar and grains were less healthy and so the Grapefruit Diet suggested you avoid these foods. This diet claimed you could lose a pound of weight each day and became very popular because of that claim. Unfortunately, there was no evidence to support that.

So, this next one I think is a little bit crazy. This one is a diet that came about in 1934 and it was called the Bananas and Skim milk Diet. Two things that are considered healthy. So, this one was developed by a gentleman named Dr. Harrop Jr. and it had you eating 4 bananas and drinking 3 glasses of skim milk a day, and nothing else.

He claimed that this diet could help someone lose up to 10 lbs. in just two weeks. You can see why, because this is significant calorie restriction and yes, bananas and skim milk are not unhealthy. However, restricting yourself to just these two things is a terrible idea.

You’re eliminating so many nutrients, and protein, but also healthy fats. All the nutrients and calories you get from all the different foods are crucial to survival and are crucial for your body to function well. As a career woman, you want your body to be able to function well. You want to be able to get through your day with energy and be able to critically think, so you can problem-solve and do the things you need to do.

Then, in the 1950s, there was another diet that was pretty popular and I think it’s an odd one. It’s called the Cabbage Soup Diet. The inventor is unknown. It involves eating cabbage soup made some other low-calorie vegetables. People claimed you could lose up to 17 lbs. a week on this diet.

So again, this was one that came out in the 50’s but then it was popular enough to come out again in the 1980s, known as the Dolly Parton Diet. I’m guessing because she probably did this diet herself and probably told people about her weight loss from it.

Then, it appeared again in 1995. Again, this is a diet consisting of cabbage soup and was popular somehow. Even doctors were prescribing this diet to their patients to lose weight quickly, especially before heart surgery. This is crazy.

Some people today even still do this diet, from what I read, and weight loss can occur quickly, but probably not the healthiest way to go about it. Next is 1961 when Weight Watchers comes out, developed by Jean Nidetch.

Interestingly, she started this diet because she was inviting friends over to her home in New York City to discuss losing weight. She had some ideas about weight loss, and the ideas took off. She started Weight Watchers a couple years later and is a multi-million dollar, maybe even multi-billion-dollar company. In this diet, you focus more on the points given to each of these foods, not so much the calories or the food itself.

Whether or not this diet is super effective or healthy depends on what foods the individual is choosing to eat, to use for their points. So, the next diet might sound a little fun to some people, but in the 1970s, we had an increase in dieting and probably because Weight Watchers really was a big one and was probably advertised heavily on TV. More and more people in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were watching TV and reading magazines, so there was lots of marketing.

In the 1970s is when the Wine and Eggs Diet came out. This one was published in Vogue Magazine in 1977 and breakfast included a hard-boiled egg, a glass of white wine, and a cup of black coffee. Can you imagine just eating a hard-boiled egg and a glass of wine in the morning?

I don’t know about you, but I’d be really tipsy with eating just one hard-boiled egg and in the morning, you’re typically dehydrated as well. Then you top it off with a cup of black coffee. So, you get the depressant with the glass of white wine and then you get the stimulant of the black coffee. I don’t know if that’s really a great idea.

Lunch was interesting. This was bumped up to two hard-boiled eggs, two glasses of wine, and a cup of black coffee. Dinner you could add in a little bit of food besides the egg and that was a 5 oz. steak, the remained of the bottle of wine and black coffee. So, this is a terrible diet. Do not try this diet at all. It basically would leave most people feeling buzzed or drunk all day.

You’re not getting enough calories from food by any means and certainly not getting the nutrients you need. This is probably the worst one that I have listed so far.

So next would be the Slim Fast Diet. You’ve probably heard of this, but this includes lots of shakes. A shake for breakfast, lunch and maybe even dinner. People still drink these shakes, you see them sometimes in grocery stores, but this diet is probably good for if you don’t mind have diarrhea all day. I imagine the fluids go through you pretty quickly.

The next one in the 1970s that I found was the Sugar Diet. This was all due to marketing. Sugar companies were actually marketing sugar as an appetite suppressant. They want you to buy more of their sugary products, so started saying good things about sugar, saying it was an appetite suppressant. So this would encourage people to eat more sugar. This is appealing to lots of people of course, because who doesn’t want to eat treats, right?

So, if someone is telling you, especially a company, that sugar is good for you and could potentially help you lose weight, then how fun is that? Just like the wine and eggs diet.

Unfortunately, this diet is not a good idea and I think this diet probably was mostly working on people who were very gullible, but not necessarily. This just really shows the influence of companies and marketing and how we can take these companies’ authority for truth. They can abuse their authority and they know the individual is looking at a company to tell them the truth, so when they blatantly will turn things so that it looks like the product they’re selling is really good for people, but it’s really terrible to be claiming that sugar is good for you and an appetite suppressant. This is just not an honest or ethical thing.

In the 1980s, a few popular diets came out as well. Jenny Craig is one of them. It became popular here in the US in 1985. Then, there was the Beverly Hills Diet in the 1980s as well. This one was entirely fruit for the first 35 days, so probably was not going to be leaving you feeling very well for the first 35 days. Also, that’s a lot of fiber, so I don’t know how well that pans out as far as gastrointestinal effects.

Alright, so there are tons of diets after that, but I’m not going to go through all of them. I just wanted to show you how wacky some of these diets have been over the years. What I found was that with each decade, more and more diets were coming out and were becoming more and more popular. Lots of money is spent on advertising on TV, the radio, magazines, and now it’s on social media oftentimes as well, right?

You also have diet pills, potions, and powders out there. It has just branched off and really infiltrated a lot of what we’re seeing.

The thing with dieting is that it is very appealing. It’s easy to see why people can get into the dieting cycle. There’s quick weight loss typically. Or there is substantial weight loss in a relatively short period of time. As career women, we want quick results. People in general want quick results. So, if we are trying to lose weight, especially as career women, we want to go all in and get those results quickly.

That’s why we can end up getting stuck in that dieting cycle. We can see that it works and then our brain goes, “oh that’s great. I lost 10 lbs. in just 3-4 weeks.” And unfortunately, that 10 lbs. can come back very quickly. The more quickly you lose weight or the more significant amount of weight that’s lost in a short period of time, the more likely your brain won’t be able to adjust to that quick or substantial weight loss and it’s going to go right back into the eating habits you feel more comfortable with.

That’s partly because you’re not addressing the thoughts and feelings going on that are driving the eating habits. You’re only addressing the action part of it. You’re only doing the things you need to do to as far as the actions or behaviors, but not necessarily working on the thought processes along the way, or the mindset. That’s why a lot of diets keep you stuck in that dieting cycle.

A lot of reasons why you can get into the dieting cycle too is because there’s women around you talking about dieting and the diets they’re on. This can really influence you. There are people at work, people outside of work like friends, or even family members that are talking about the newest thing that they’re trying, as far as losing weight and dieting and what diets have worked for them.

It makes you think, “oh maybe I’ll try that diet.” Especially if someone else is doing it and they ask you if you want to do the diet with them. Human beings are very social creatures and we are very easily influenced by what others are doing and that can include strangers, but more so even people who are close to us…colleagues, friends, family members.

So, this is another reason why you can really get stuck in that dieting cycle. There are lots of downsides to a lot of these diets. Most are not sustainable and can even lead to health problems. Some can even be dangerous. Most of them are not enjoyable either.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to eat hard-boiled eggs for pretty much every meal. Even the Sugar Diet doesn’t sound appealing. I don’t like sugar that much to eat it all the time. The Cabbage Soup Diet? No thanks. Bananas and skim milk? Absolutely not. It’s tough for me to get through one banana. I can’t imagine eating four of them.

Some of these are extreme, I get it. But a lot of them, because they are so restrictive of calories to get that weight loss, they can leave you feeling poorly physically and mentally. It’s a big mental challenge to be hungry and to be restricting yourself so significantly that you’re overly hungry. When you’re overly hungry, your more primitive part of your brain, the survival part kicks in and says, “Just give me the food. I can’t take this anymore.”

Dieting is so extreme sometimes, that it can be dangerous. It can cause you to give up quickly or fall off the wagon quickly and dramatically and even permanently. You can slip back a lot of times to prior eating habits, because these changes are so significant. Your brain can’t handle the quick, drastic changes. Your brain has been doing things a certain way for so many years.

That’s not to say you can’t change it. You absolutely can change it, but you must do it a smarter way. That means doing things less drastically. It means staying one step ahead of your brain. You’re really using your pre-frontal cortex, that higher-functioning part of your brain to stay ahead of the more primitive part of the brain, which is just going to want those quicker results. It’s more about that instant gratification as far as the weight loss.

Also, when you do start to get hungry, it’s all about that instant gratification as far as getting those hunger signals to go away. You want things to be more gradual. You don’t want the extremes. You want to keep things more in the middle. That’s really the best way to go about it. You’re keeping it controlled by using that pre-frontal cortex. You’re leading with that part, rather than that more primitive part, so you’re staying one step ahead.

What happens with that dieting cycle is that you may lose that weight quickly. That feels good, it feels rewarding. But then you might gain that weight back and a lot of times, that’s what ends up happening. Then, your brain remembers, “Oh, that diet worked for me before. I’m going to do that one again.” Or maybe you’ll try a different one. You might have success. But again, what’s going to happen is that you’ll slip back, maybe not completely back, but mostly back and you gain most of the weight back.

Unfortunately, this then makes you start to lose confidence in yourself over time. This is why that dieting cycle is not great either. You can have these short-term successes, but also have failures that make you start to lose confidence in yourself. It can start to make you feel poorly about yourself and your capabilities. That’s one of the benefits of changing your eating habits in a more controlled, sustainable way.

Because it’s easier to do in the sense that you’re not putting in all this huge physical and mental and emotional effort. You’re not getting drained emotionally and feeling like you’re failing. You’re not losing confidence. You’re actually slowly starting to gain more and more confidence.

The nice thing about changing your eating habits is you’re not eliminating foods you enjoy. You’re not eliminating entire food groups. It’s not about never eating chocolate again. It’s not about never eating fried food again. It’s about being in control, and not feeling terrible along the way.

So, how exactly do you get out of that dieting cycle then?

The first thing really is just listening to this podcast episode. Just that awareness and knowledge of why the dieting cycle is a cycle you’ll end up getting stuck in, like a habit, and it’s not a good cycle to stay in. When you’re looking at the long game, you’re not doing yourself any favors. So having that awareness is key.

Then, what you’re going to want to do to get out of that dieting cycle is to make that commitment to yourself that you do want to think about the long-term. So, if you do want to think about the long-term, then you have to commit to being patient. That’s really the next step to get out of that dieting cycle. To commit to being patient. Patient doesn’t mean losing 20 lbs. and taking two years to do it. It means not expecting 20 lbs. of weight loss in 3 weeks.

If you understand that you need to have some patience in order to get the results you’ve been looking for, and you make the commitment and you get excited about those long-term results, and that changing your eating habits will get you to where you want to be, having patience will seem easy. If you can focus on those long-term results and that you’ll be way more likely to keep those results, that’s very exciting.

The next thing you’re going to have to do to get out of that dieting cycle is to realize that you also need to work on the thoughts and the feelings behind the actions. What this means is that just understanding that its not just the actions as far as eating goes, it’s also the thoughts and feelings behind the actions. The triggers.

What’s triggering you to eat certain foods? What’s going to be good for motivating you to eat more of the foods that are good for you and less of the foods that are holding you back from reaching your health and body goals. So, the thoughts and feelings are always going to be the factors that drive your actions.

To change your actions or behaviors, you need to work on the thoughts and feelings behind them. So, someone just telling you what to eat and what not to eat, won’t be that effective. Someone helping you to see all the underlying reasons why you’re doing as far as eating certain foods or amounts, is going to be key.

Otherwise, you can put in all that effort to try to eat what you think you should eat and not eat what you are trying to avoid, but unless you really understand what it is that is causing all that and address all those underlying issues, or triggers, you’re not going to be able to get out of the dieting cycle.

The dieting cycle primarily focuses on the action part of it. It doesn’t take everything into account…the thoughts, feelings, and actions. That’s why changing your eating habits is going to be so much more effective for you long-term. It helps you address the thoughts and feelings behind the actions.

That’s what I help people with inside Food Freedom. It’s not telling you what to eat, what to avoid. It helps you with the thoughts and feelings, and triggers behind your actions and addressing those. So, they no longer cause you to slip back to your bad eating habits. That’s what I have for you. This episode was actually quite longer than usual. Hopefully you found this episode interesting. Thanks so much for listening. Take care and I’ll talk with you soon.