For the body obsessed or even normal dieters, the holiday period from around October through to January can be a true minefield. Between the specific holidays of Halloween (mercifully passed), Thanksgiving and Christmas, along with endless goody baskets and parties, folks can run into problems maintaining the habits they strive to follow the rest of the year.

A lot of strategies exist to deal with this time, especially among the body obsessed, although I’d consider few of them particularly healthy from a mental or psychological standpoint.  One is to become a social pariah. Can’t control your food at parties? Simply skip all of them. While this might avoid food issues, it’s also a way to make your friends and co-workers think you’re an anti-social asshole.  Which is fine, I guess, if you are an anti-social asshole.  But it won’t do much for your inter-work relationships.

Another common one is to take the needed meal or food (e.g. turkey, broccoli, plain sweet potato) with you in a Tupperware bowl. I’ve heard of folks doing this at Thanksgiving dinner, usually so that they can sit and look down upon their family members with an air of superiority. “Oh, I can’t believe you’d eat that, that’s why you’re fat.” Newsflash folks, not only are we talking about a borderline eating disorder at this point (see also: orthorexia/Chris Shugart), that kind of insanity just makes your family uncomfortable. So don’t do it.  Better to stay home than be an asshole.

Of course, at the other extreme are the dis-inhibited eaters who just go completely crazy and eat everything in sight, gaining a considerable amount of weight and fat in the three months of holidays. It can happen and I’m not saying that it can’t. Of course, if you’re a bodybuilder or powerlifter, you can just say “I’m bulking” as you shovel down the third piece of cake but I’ll assume that you actually want to keep a lid on weight/fat gains during this time period. Balance please.

As always, being a middle of the road kind of guy that I am, I’m going to suggest some strategies that, while not quite as disturbed as taking broccoli with you to Thanksgiving, also doesn’t put you in the trap of gorging on fudge. In no real particular order of importance, here are 10 Tips to Deal with Holiday Weight Gain from getting out of hand over the holidays.

1. Make Better Bad Choices

I forget who I stole this idea from offhand but it’s nothing new. The simple fact, and I’ll come back to this in point 10, is that many people fall into the trap of “If I’m going to eat junk, I might as well jam as much of the worst stuff I can down my food hole.” That’s silly.

Instead, try to make better bad choices. Limit portions (you know that you don’t really NEED three pieces of cake to be satisfied). Pick the lower calorie or lower fat/high-carb stuff at the dessert table. People training hard can handle an influx of carbs acutely better than fat so pick that stuff.  Maybe have a little bit of two or three different desserts, just get a taste and move on. You get the idea.

2. Take a Lowered Fat/Calorie Dessert or Dish to the Party

Whether a work party or holiday dinner, it’s not uncommon for people to bring their own thing to add to the food table. So make something that you’ve de-fatted or lowered in calories, there are zillions of recipes out there. And, please, I’m not talking about black bean ‘cake’ that you think tastes like the real thing.

Find a happy medium between the high-sugar/high-fat stuff and clean eating. Most American desserts have about twice the sugar and butter that they usually need and, who knows, you might even convert someone into realizing that they can eat sweets without it having to be 1000 calories per piece.

3. Train with a Bit Higher Volume Prior to the Event

One of the best ways to increase the ‘sink’ for incoming calories is to deplete muscle glycogen. When you do that by using a higher volume (more sets, higher reps) of training, not only do you increase fat oxidation, you give incoming carbs somewhere to go for storage instead of being used for energy.

You can simply bump up your volume a bit in the days before a specific event where you know there will be junk. Even a heavy training session on the day of the party can be beneficial here. And, bonus, you’ll be pumped at the party.  Great for pulling that hot co-worker so you can both be really uncomfortable the next day at the water cooler.

Train in a nice hypertrophy zone (get about 40 reps per muscle group) and you’ll increase protein synthesis so that incoming calories will support growth. Training also tends to acutely blunt hunger so if you train right before the party, you’ll be less likely to overeat. Well, unless you’re a typically dis-inhibited eater who falls into the trap of “I trained, I deserve 10 pieces of fudge.”

4. Start with Lots of Lean Protein and Vegetables Before Hitting the Dessert Table

This one is for the body obsessed and dieters alike. Lean protein has the highest short-term satiating power (this means it keeps you full) and the high-bulk of vegetables helps to fill your stomach which also sends a fullness signal. I’ve yet to be at a holiday party that didn’t have a vegetable plate (limit the high-fat dip) or plate of cold cuts. Load up on that to get some fullness going before you hit the desserts.  You won’t be as hungry and, assuming you don’t like eating yourself sick, this alone will do damage control.

5. Have a High-Protein Snack with some Vegetables or Fruit about 30′ Beforehand

If you’re in a situation where Number 4 won’t work or won’t be available, have a small snack before the party or dinner. Some lean protein, veggies and fruit about 30 minutes will give you a feeling of fullness and help to limit overconsumption of ‘junk’ at the party.

6. Consider Intermittent Fasting on the Day of the Event

Intermittent Fasting (IF’ing) is a recent dietary approach that involves not eating for 14-18 hours per day and then either having an ‘eat period’ of roughly 4-6 hour or even a single meal. There’s some interesting research on it and I’ll discuss it at a later date on the site. But it’s one good way to deal with holiday parties.

Know that you’ve got a 7pm dinner party where there will be lots of yummy food? Try IF’ing (or only have small meals of lean protein and veggies) most of the day. Unless you go completely berserk, you’ll be unlikely to exceed your entirely daily caloric requirement in the one meal. If you can train beforehand, even better.

7. Consider a Short Mini-Diet in the Days Before the Event

Let’s say you have an event or two coming up on the weekend and you know that there will be lots of food and you may have control issues. Well, consider doing a short, possibly hardcore diet in the days before. My Rapid Fat Loss Handbook would be perfect, 4 days of it can actually reduce body fat by 1-4 pounds (depending on your size) and you can schedule the free meal and/or refeed for your events. Call it pro-active damage control.

8. Ok, I Was Actually Kidding in the Introduction About the Tupperware

Let’s face it, you know that nothing tastes as good as lean feels, you know how good discipline feels, you know that you’re better than all of those weak willed candy and dessert eaters; you read Chris Shugart’s insane ramblings and actually take his bullshit seriously.  You know the truth. You know you’re better than them and 50 years from now when you’re old and decrepit, you’ll know that it was worth it, sticking to your diet 365 days a year and never actually enjoying a moment of life.

So you go ahead and take your Tupperware with chicken breast, broccoli and sweet potato and eat it while everyone else around you actually gets some joy out of life and you feel miserable, alone, deprived and isolated.  Know deep down that you’re not only physically superior but also morally superior.

No, really, I’m seriously kidding about this, don’t do it. If you do, I hope someone pins you to the ground and force feeds you fudge until you throw up.  Just because you’re an asshole.

9. Stay Off the Damn Scale

No matter what happens, folks often see the scale spike up after a big party; this is especially true after Thanksgiving. The typical carb-depleted trainee is especially prone to this; the high-carb intake of your typical holiday event along with extra sodium both can jack up scale weight a bit. But you know deep down it’s not really fat. The simple fact is that, unless you go nuts, you can’t eat enough in a single meal to put on appreciable fat. It’s only water and it’ll come right back off in a few days.

But stay off the scale anyhow.

10. Don’t Be Your Own Worst Enemy

This goes back to what I alluded to in point 1, a lot of people fall into a dreadful trap over the holidays, figuring that if they’ve eaten a little bit of junk food, clearly they’ve blown it and might as well retire to the corner with the entire tray of fudge and eat themselves sick.

I’m going to quote from the foreword of my own A Guide to Flexible Dieting here:

Then the problem hits. Maybe it’s something small, a slight deviation or dalliance. There’s a bag
of cookies and you have one or you’re at the mini mart and just can’t resist a little something that’s not on your diet. Or maybe it’s something a little bit bigger, a party or special event comes up and you know you won’t be able to stick with your diet. Or, at the very extreme, maybe a vacation comes up, a few days out of town or even something longer, a week or two. What do you do?

 

Now, if you’re in the majority, here’s what happens: You eat the cookie and figure that you’ve blown your diet and might as well eat the entire bag. Clearly you were weak willed and pathetic for having that cookie, the guilt sets in and you might as well just start eating and eating and eating.

 

Or since the special event is going to blow your diet, you might as well eat as much as you can and give up, right? The diet is obviously blown by that single event so might as well chuck it all in the garbage.

 

Sound familiar? Yeah I thought it might. The above is amazingly prevalent and exceedingly destructive. Extremely rigid dieters fall into a trap where they let events such as the holidays become a problem because of their own psychology. They figure that one piece of dessert has ruined all of their hard efforts so they might as well eat ALL the dessert. Which is, of course, nonsense. Say that piece of dessert has a few hundred calories, or say 500 calories. In the context of a weekly plan that is calorie controlled with training, that’s nothing.

Unless the person lets it become something. They figure 500 calories is the end of the world and eat an additional 5000 calories. Instead of just taking it in stride and realizing that it’s not big deal, they make it a big deal with their own reaction.

Simply, don’t do that. Realize that there is only so much damage you can do in the short-term. Apply the other strategies in this article and realize, at the end of the day, what you did for one meal that week simply doesn’t matter if the rest of the week was fine. Not unless you make it.

And that’s that, 10 strategies I hope will help you to enjoy the holidays. Eat a piece of cake for me.

So that’s the topic of today’s article:: The Full Diet Break.  What it is and why and how (to a limited degree), to do it.

What is a Full Diet Break?

Whenever I bring up this topic, I tend to get sort of confused looks from people; what do you mean I’m supposed to take a break from my diet?  As I opined on the podcast, I have no idea if this is just an idea endemic to America (where we suffer from a long-history of a Puritan work ethic) or is just common to dieters but most people who are trying to lose weight or fat seem to feel that the key to success is to be as miserable as possible for as long as possible. While this certainly isn’t the only reason diets fail, I don’t think it helps.

This was actually a big part of the reason that I originally wrote A Guide to Flexible Dieting as there is a good bit of research (comparing rigid and flexible dieters) showing that people who are more flexible in their eating patterns are more successful in the long-term, showing less binge eating habits and weighing less.

And while that idea might seem contradictory given the other book I mentioned The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, I’d only note that that book incorporates many of the flexible dieting principles anyhow.  But I’m getting off topic.

The idea of a full diet break, in short, is that it’s a period, typically 10-14 days where explicit dieting is stopped.  Calories should be raised to roughly maintenance (I often recommend adjusting estimated maintenance down by about 10% to account for metabolic slowdown and such; here’s How to Estimate Maintenance Caloric Requirements) with carbohydrates in the 100-150 gram/day range as a minimum.  I’ll explain some of the rationale behind these recommendations in a second.

I’d note that I’m not the first to suggest this idea by any stretch.  The first formal suggestion I remember of this came from an early mentor of mine, Dan Duchaine.  He routinely recommended 2 week periods at maintenance between periods of active contest dieting for a variety of reasons.  I’m sure others did as well.

I’d note that I really formalized the idea of the full diet break after reading a fascinating little paper I came across.  Since it’ll be faster, I’m just going to excerpt from A Guide to Flexible Dieting:

Before I continue, I want to tell you about one of the coolest studies I’ve seen in a while. I say cool mainly because of the fact that the scientists failed so miserably in their goal, while making an absolutely wonderful discovery. For anybody who wants to look it up, the full reference is “Wing RR and RW Jeffrey. Prescribed ‘Breaks’ as a means to disrupt weight control efforts. Obes Res (2003) 11: 287-291.”

The study was set up to find out why people go off the dieting bandwagon. That is, the researchers wanted to determine what behavioral things happen when people go off of their diet for some period, and why they have trouble going back on.

So the subjects were first put on a typical diet meant to cause weight loss. Then the subjects were told to go off the diet for either 2 weeks or 6 weeks so that the researchers could see what happened when people fell off their diet but hard and started regaining weight. Here’s what happened: not only did the subjects not regain very much weight, but they had almost no trouble going right back onto their diet when the 2 (or 6) weeks was over. So the scientists completely and utterly failed to reach their goal of studying what they wanted to study.

Basically, they made an almost accidental discovery which raised another set of questions:why didn’t the subjects regain a ton of weight and why did they have little problem returning to their diet? That is, knowing that most people who go off of a diet for even a short period will balloon up, regaining weight rapidly, and fall off their diet, what made this study (or these subjects) different?

The basic issue seemed to come down to that of control. To understand this, let’s consider two different situations. First let’s say that you’re the typical rigid dieter hammering away on your perfect diet, no lapses, no mistakes. Suddenly something comes up that is out of your control. A stressful period of life, the aforementioned vacation, whatever. Feeling out of control, you figure your diet is blown and the binge begins. Does this sound familiar at all?

But consider what happened in this study, the subjects were told by the researchers to go off their diet; in essence, the break was part of the diet. And they didn’t blow up, didn’t gain a ton of weight, and had no problem going right back onto the diet.

I suspect that that was the key difference and why the study failed so miserably: control.  Psychologically, feeling like the break is now under your control, or that it’s part of your overall plan, makes it far easier to not feel like the diet is completely blown and get back on the diet when things settle down.

Understand what I’m getting at?  Tangentially, and this is discussed in the book, while many seem to flexibly diet sort of intuitively, many don’t seem able to do this.  For them I recommend what I confusingly call structured flexible dieting.  Basically, planning the timing of the strategies described in the book.  Basically, it puts the dieter in control of the diet, rather than the diet controlling the dieter.  Which is what I think a big part of the study described above was about.

So that’s what a full diet break is, the next topic to address is what the purpose is.

There are actually a number of good reasons to take a full diet break, both behavioral and physiological.  I want to look at both.

Why Take a Full Diet Break: Physiological Reasons

The physiological stuff is the stuff I talk about all the time here on the site, on the forum and elsewhere.  When folks diet and lose weight/fat, the body adjusts metabolic rate downwards.  While a majority of this is simply due to weighing less (smaller bodies burn fewer calories), there is also an adaptive component, a greater decrease in metabolic rate than would be predicted due to changes in things like leptin, insulin, thyroid hormones, etc.

By moving to roughly maintenance for a couple of weeks, many of those hormones are given time to recover.  Thyroid hormones come back up, as does leptin.  This is a big part of the reason for the recommendation to raise carbs to 100-150 grams per day as a minimum.

Thyroid hormones are distinctly sensitive to carbohydrate intake as are leptin levels (especially in the short-term).  Just raising calories but keeping the diet very low carb doesn’t accomplish everything hormonally I want the full diet break to do.

This is also the rationale behind the duration, thyroid hormones and the effects that they exert aren’t immediate.  It may take 7 days of eating at maintenance for thyroid levels to come back to normal, but you need at least another week to get many of their effects to max out.  So in answer to the question “Can I make the break shorter?”, the answer is “No.”  I know that everyone wants to GET LEAN NOW but unless you are a contest dieting bodybuilder or figure chick and there’s no real-time constraint, what’s the hurry?

There are other effects as well.  Hormones like testosterone often go down during dieting and female hormones can be whacked out too.  Cortisol generally goes up when you diet and raising calories and carbs helps shut that off for a bit.

I’d note in this regards that many find that, after a period of hard dieting, they often keep leaning out into the first week of a planned break.   As I discussed in the article Of Whooshes and Squishy Fat, some of it may simply be dropping water.

But some of it does seem to be true fat loss.  People keep bugging me for the mechanism and my current best-answer is “Magic!”.  At some point, I might throw out some of my theories on it.  Not today.

As well, for leaner individuals, even if they do everything ‘right’, there is often a loss of performance or muscle mass during a diet.  The two weeks with raised calories gives them the capacity to train a bit more and recover what they’ve lost before moving into the next stage of dieting.

Finally, the idea has been thrown out there that stabilizing at a given (reduced) body weight or body fat might give the body a better chance of accepting that new weight as ‘normal’ and adjusting setpoint.  Frankly, I’ve never seen anything to support that in the literature.  It’d be lovely but I tend to doubt that’s how it works.  I’m just mentioning it for completeness.

Why Take a Full Diet Break: Psychological Reasons

Of course, there aren’t only physiological reasons for using the full diet break concept, for many dieters (especially heavier, since the adaptation issues tend to be less) the main benefit may be psychological.  Frankly, this is something that I feel that many lean diet/obesity experts often can’t really comprehend, the types of psychological stress that dieting can engender for people with a lot of weight to lose.

Tangentially, since I’m just in that kind of mood, I see the same thing in a lot of the popular ‘Do body weight metabolic training to lose fat’ manuals.  The exercise are always demonstrated by skinny fit people.  I want to see some of these coaches have an unfit individual at 300 pounds do a t-push up on 1-arm.  But I’m really off-topic now.

Anyhow, say that you are someone who is extremely overweight, perhaps you have 50-100 pound of weight to lose (or more).  Going by the standard recommendations of 1-2 pounds per week, that means that you are realistically looking at 25-50 weeks of dieting.  And let’s face it, no matter what diet you are on, that means some period of feeling hungry, deprived, etc.  There’s just no getting around it.

For people with more weight to lose, the time frames may even be extended beyond that.

Now, I want everyone to stop and think about that for a second, the amount of mental stress that that tends to create from the get-go.  Is it any wonder that some people never bother starting?

Put differently, if I told you that you had to be miserable and feel deprived and hungry for the next 1-2 years, would you bother?  Probably not.

But what if, instead of facing that huge mountain, you knew that you only had to go say, 10-12 weeks of dieting before getting a break for 2 weeks where you could eat relatively ‘normally’ (note: this does NOT mean returning to your old horrible eating habits) before starting the next phase of active weight loss?

Suddenly, that might seem a whole hell of a lot more doable.  And if you’re using the other concepts of free meals (relatively ‘normal’ non-diet meals eaten once or twice a week) and refeeds (periods of deliberate high-carbohydrate overfeeding) during the periods of active dieting, it may be that you’re never having to feel like you’re full-blown dieting for more than 4-5 days before you get a small break.

Does that scan for folks?  We’ve moved from “You have to be hungry and miserable for the next 365 days straight” to “You will get a break of some sort from your diet at least once a week and perhaps more.”

Let me put this in a slightly different context: it would be a rare coach indeed who would expect their athletes to work at 100% 7 days/week, 4 weeks a month, 12 months a year.  Athletes have light days, perhaps one day off per week, perhaps every 4th week with reduced loading, they usually take 2 weeks completely off every year.  Sure, some of this is to allow physiological adaptation but some of it is psychological; you can’t maintain that intensity every day of your life without burning out.

So why should a dieter expect (or be expected) to do exactly that?

Anyhow, those are some of the psychological benefits behind the full-diet break. For people with extended periods of dieting ahead of them, in addition to any other benefits, it breaks the periods of active dieting into much more manageable chunks.

Instead of expecting these seemingly never-ending periods of extended dieting, there is at least some light at the end of the tunnel. That’s in addition to putting the control of when the breaks happen rather than having the person lose control because the break is forced upon them, they can plan it themselves.

On that note, one topic I go into in a bit of detail in A Guide to Flexible Dieting is whether the full break should be planned or unplanned.  In that context, one of the more powerful uses of the full diet break is that it can be used in situations (such as the holidays, or vacation) when someone knows that they won’t be able to really stick to their diet.

In those sorts of uncontrolled situations, I find that people tend to feel a real sense of loss of control and they can go off their diet never to return. The full diet break can simply be planned around those time periods and suddenly the control has been returned to the dieter.  They can do their best damage control knowing that, if anything, the 10-14 day period (or whatever) is finite and won’t do that much damage, returning to their diet when it’s over.

Summing Up

So that’s the basics of the full diet break. Of course there is more to it discussed in the book but I’m running long-again.  How often to take a break is a big issue and fundamentally depends on the person’s body fat.  Contrary to what most think, leaner individuals should take diet breaks MORE often than fatter because the adaptive aspects of dieting are greater.

Proving once again that I’m just retreading others who came before me, Dan Duchaine recommended 4 weeks of dieting before 2 weeks of raised calories and then 4 more weeks of dieting as part of a 10 week contest diet.  I’m a bit more flexible (get it) than that, a leaner individual might go 4-6 weeks before taking a full diet break, someone who is much fatter might go 12 weeks.  Folks in the middle go somewhere in-between.

I’d note that I even think that contest dieters should use full diet breaks although this requires not only being lean enough when they start but also giving themselves sufficient time to include the break AND still have time to get lean enough.  Most dieters start to late and end up not being able to take a diet break but I believe that their diets would work better if they did.

Of course, there’s more information than this that I don’t have time to cover.  It’s all in the book and I’d only finish by saying that I wish more people would take full diet breaks.  It’s a concept that tends to be counterintuitive (how does going off a diet make it work better) but in my experience and with what the research says, it works.

People tend to fixate on short-term results (as noted above they want to BE LEAN NOW) but for most applications, long-term adherence is far more important.  In the big scheme of things, what is two weeks not losing fat if, not only does the break mean you lose fat MORE effectively (because you’ve normalized hormones) but you increase your odds of long-term success by not being so psychologically stressed all the time.

That’s what the full diet break is all about.

Over the years, I’ve seen a particular pattern that is pretty endemic among the body obsessed: that is what dietary behavior researchers would call rigid dieting patterns (restrained dieting might be a little more accurate here but I don’t want to get into the distinction that deeply).

Rigid dieters are the folks who are, to some degree or another, always controlling their overall food intake. They never relax, they never allow themselves to ‘cheat’ (a term I dislike for various reasons). And, sort of like the type of athlete I talked about in Goal vs. Process Oriented Athletes: Part 1 before, they often see better short-term results.

The problem is that, if something happens and they go off their diet for whatever reason, they end up going completely off their diet. Contest bodybuilders have some of the worst problems with this, 12-16 weeks of total deprivation leads into a 4-6 week food orgy where weight and fat are both regained rapidly, no training is done, etc. The cycle repeats annually.

In research, extremely rigid dieters are often heavier (mainly because of the cheats and binges they undergo when they break their diets) and often have poorer long-term success than what are called flexible dieters.

Flexible dieters allow for, well, flexibility in their lives. They realize that a little bit of something that isn’t ‘on their diet’ is no big deal in the big scheme of things, they often weigh less, etc. In my experience, while the short-term results may not be as great, the long-term results are usually better.

This type of self-destructive rigid dieting behavior manifests in other ways as well. How many times have you (or someone you know) started a diet and things were going just fine. But then you had a little bit of something not on your diet, a cookie or whatever. The guilt sets in, clearly you blew your diet, might as well eat the whole bag, right?

But step back and think about it rationally.

Say you’ve been dieting well for 6 straight days and then, one day, you have a cookie or two. What is that, 100 calories, maybe 150. Can that 150 calories truly derail the previous 6 days? Hell, think about it more, if you were to adjust your daily caloric intake so that you took out 150 calories elsewhere to account for the cookies, have you done any harm at all? Of course not.

But if you decide that your diet is clearly blown and you then eat the entire bag, to the tune of 1000 calories. Well now you HAVE done yourself a ton of damage. But not through the eating of the first two cookies. Rather, through the psychological damage that can occur when you think in absolute terms. Either you are on your diet perfectly (100% adherence), or you’re not.

I’d note that some gurus actually seem to approach dieting, especially physique contest dieting, by promoting rigid behaviors. A very short list of acceptable foods is given and anything eaten that isn’t on the list means failure. At least that’s how it’s programmed into the dieter.

Of course, many diets (mine included) also allow a ‘cheat’ day or mea. of some sort or another. Now, used properly, these can be extremely useful. I’ve prepped bodybuilders to contest shape with diets that included 1-3 days of controlled overfeeding per week.

I’d note that I don’t like looking at them as ‘cheat’ days as, invariably, this psychologically programs the dieter to go out of their way to eat the worst crap they can lay their hands on. The stories I’ve seen, dieters deliberately force feeding themselves junk to the point of sickness during their ‘cheat’ days.

In contrast, I prefer to refer to ‘free’ meals (normal meals that are a little less rigid than whatever diet you’re on) or ‘refeeds’ (high carb/high calorie days). I also program in full diet breaks, periods of 10-14 days when you go off your diet and eat at maintenance. This is all described in The Guide to Flexible Dieting.

But the way that many use them becomes an abuse. The goal of a free meal is a psychological break from your diet, refeeds exist to exert a specific physiological response (raising leptin and others), so do full diet breaks. The goal is to make your diet work better, not eliminate all of the progress of the previous week by eating three cheesecakes until you want to vomit.

So let my tie this in with holiday eating. At some point over the next six to eight weeks, you know you’ll find yourself at a holiday party with tons of junk food, sweets and such. If you consider yourself ‘hardcore’, you might even be obnoxious enough to take your Tupperware container of chicken breast, rice and broccoli with you. And you’ll feel miserable watching everybody else eat the stuff you know you really want during it. God forbid you have a piece of candy, odds are that will lead into an orgy of food consumption.

So instead, how about going to that same party with a different mentality. Plan to allow yourself a bit of ‘junk’ and realize that, in the big scheme of things, it doesn’t make an ounce of difference. You’re not going to put on three pounds of fat because you had a couple of piece of chocolate, your muscles aren’t going to fall off because you only got 25 grams of protein from ham instead of your ideal mix of whey, casein and gemma protein.

However, you might find that you enjoyed the holidays a whole lot more without feeling deprived OR falling into the trap of eating like a maniac out of guilt.

But before doing that I need to make something very clear: the distinction I’m making between psychology and physiology is simply for convenience, it’s not one that really truly exists.

That is to say, psychology impacts on physiology and physiology impacts on psychology and the days of pretending the body and mind are separate non-interacting entities are long, long gone. Again, I’ll make the separation primarily for reasons of convenience, it will save me some needless complexity in the upcoming discussion. Just keep in mind that it’s an artificial and non-existent separation in reality.

Modern science, for example the field of psychoneuroimmunology, recognizes that the brain and body are in a constant state of interaction and involvement with one another. This is sort of the basis for the idea that you can think yourself sick, or for the idea that people with a more positive attitude are more likely to survive certain diseases (such as cancer). Your thought processes can impact on such workings of your body as immune function.

Put more simply, how you think affects how your body works and how your body works can affect how you think or feel.

Incidentally, for anybody who is interested in this topic, I would highly, highly, highly recommend almost any of the books by science writer Robert Sapolsky, especially his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers where this topic is discussed in some detail (primarily wrt: cortisol and stress). This is literally one of my top-5 books ever and I cannot recommend it too highly.

Anyhow, while you’re sitting there reading this, I want you to start thinking about something that really makes you angry. Taxes, gas prices, my inability to blog consistently, take your pick. Really get a good anger going. Now stop for a second and pay attention to your body: odds are that your heart rate is up, if we measured blood pressure it would be increased too, you might be breathing a little bit harder, you get the idea. The mere act of thinking about something that upset you had a strong physiological effect throughout your body.

Here’s another example in the reverse direction: everybody knows how they get really lethargic and lazy when they are sick with something like the flu or a bad cold or what have you. It’s as if when you are sick your body is deliberately trying to get you to lay around all day and rest. This turns out to basically be the case.

When you are sick, your body releases short-lived chemicals called cytokines, some of which are inflammatory. Inflammatory cytokines, in addition to making you feel like warmed over crap when you have the flu or something, they also directly impact on the brain and your motivation to move around.

I’d note that a similar mechanism has been suggested as a primary cause of overtraining; called the cytokine hypothesis of overtraining I think it ties together a lot of conflicting and contradictory data on the topic. It explains changes in performance along with behavior and ties together the previous held (but wrong idea) of local versus central overtraining. It turns out that they are the same thing and local effects (tissue damage) is causing central effects (behavior and motivation changes).

Essentially constant/chronic/excessive inflammation locally (in the muscles you’re training) causes an increase in inflammatory cytokines and this is responsible for the lack of motivation to train and lethargy that often sets in. Essentially, your body (your muscles) are trying to ‘tell’ your brain to give it a rest and take some down-time. Of course, humans, being the stubborn folks that we are, often choose to ignore or over-ride these signals.

This has a lot of relevance to the issue of dieting failure which is what I’ll be talking about next.

Now, I have read a LOT of diet books; too many frankly. Most follow a fairly standard organization (the first chapter always explaining that YOUR FAT IS NOT YOUR FAULT) and, with very very few exceptions, most will tell you that ‘calorie restricted diets don’t work for weight loss’ and that whatever magic they are selling is the key to quick, easy (and of course permanent) weight loss.

Whether it’s insulin, dietary fat, the protein:carbohydrate or insulin:glucagon ratio, partitioning or whatever other bullshit, they will make it sound like caloric intake is not the key aspect in whether or not someone gains weight.

In almost all cases, the idea that food intake must be restricted in any fashion is dismissed; if it is mentioned it is generally as a short aside late in the book that nobody pays any attention to.

This is purely a psychological ploy; it sucks to have to consciously restrict food intake and this causes mental stress. Simply knowing that you can’t eat what you want when you want it blows; I hate it as much as the next person. Many people will feel hungrier simply because they know that they can’t eat what they want when they want it.

Yet the fundamental fact is that the body will NOT have any need to tap into stored body fat unless the individual is burning more calories than they are taking in. Of course this means that either energy expenditure has to go up, caloric intake has to go down, or both have to occur.

So how can these books make this claim? It’s simple: they all hide basic caloric restriction in whatever they happen to be proposing. Basically, this is Lyle’s Rule #1 of Diet books:

All diet books tell you that you won’t have to restrict calories, and then trick you into doing it anyway.

One of my favorite examples is Enter the Zone by Barry Sears. After prattling on about insulin:glucagon and partitioning and how caloric restriction doesn’t work and all the standard hot buttons, he then sets up a diet that will put everyone on about 900-1200 calories/day. But it’s not the caloric restriction causing the weight loss, of course, it’s the magic protein:carb ratio.

All of the rules, the food combining, the elimination of carbs, the elimination of fat, don’t eat XXX at all (where XXX is something that contributes a lot of calories to the diet), don’t eat YYY after 6pm (where YYY is something people tend to overeat in the evenings), etc. are all just ways of tricking people into eating less without having to think about it.

Now, in one sense, I have no problem with this, anything that gets people to eat less without having to think too hard about it is usually a good thing since it avoids some of the psychological stress that occurs with dieting. And, at least to some degree for some time it can work effectively. I remember a specific client years ago, wanted to lose weight and I saw that he was drinking like 4 regular sodas per day. I told him to switch to diet, he cut several hundred calories per day by doing so and lost about a pound a week for quite some time. Without having to consciously feel restricted.

But there’s often a HUGE problem that comes with this type of approach and telling people that calories don’t matter often goes horribly wrong (not to mention being intellectually disingenuous) becuase of a simple factor and that factor is human beings and how their brains work.

Left to their own devices, most people will find ways to take ‘You can eat as much as you like as long as you do/don’t do XXX’ and fuck it up completely.

Take for example the original low-fat mania of the late 80′s. Having realized that dietary fat was most calorically dense than carbohydrate, studies found that when you reduce fat intake, people tended to eat less calories and lose weight. MAGIC!

Except that somewhere the message got garbled and people heard that ‘As long as you don’t eat fat, that’s all that matters’.

Which wouldn’t have been a problem had people stuck with unrefined naturally occurring low-fat foods (it’s nearly impossible to overeat plain baked potato). But when companies brought calorically dense but no-fat foods (Snackwell’s anybody) to market, people got screwed; a diet that should have naturally reduced food/caloric intake ended up not doing so and people either didn’t lose fat or gained it.

There was also the phenomenon whereby people would subconsiously allow themselves to eat more food if they thought it was low-fat. The classic study gave people normal fat yogurt and either told them that it was or wasn’t low/no-fat. The group that thought the yogurt was no-fat ate more of it.

Tangentially, you can see similar things with stuff as innocuous as artificial sweeteners (which should help people reduce calories). On some subconsious level, people compensate for the calories they think they are saving with the sweetener by allowing themselves other stuff with more calories. End result is no result.

I’d also note that the same can happen with activity, a topic I’ll come back to later. People tend to vastly overestimate how many calories they are burning with activity and you frequently see people following a logic along the lines of ‘I must have burned 1000 calories in that aerobics class, I deserve that cheeseburger and milkshake.’ Which given that they probably only burned a few hundred calories in the workout is a problem because they end up eating far more calories than they burned.

In any case, something similar to the low-carb debacle happened with low-carb diets as authors like Atkins told people that they could eat ‘as much as they liked’ and lose weight without caloric restriction. Given that carbohydrates typically make up 50% or more of the daily diet, when you tell people not to eat them, caloric intake falls.

Yes, I know people claim to be eating certain amounts but the few studies on the topic show that ad-lib ketogenic diets have people eating about 1700 calories. So they lose weight. MAGIC!

Except that the message that got heard ended up being ‘Calories don’t matter as long as you don’t eat carbs.’ By the time people figured out way to make fake food with no carbs but lots of calories (I saw lowcarb jelly beans at one point) it all went wrong. People ended up eating more total calories and despite eating ‘no carbs’, there are legions of people on the net who are ‘eating no carbs’ but not losing weight. But try to tell them that it’s their caloric intake and they won’t have any of it. Endless stall excuses are made but, at the end of the day, it’s still calories.

So tying this in with the last blog post, I basically want to make the following point, one that I sort of alluded to when I started this series. For a fat loss diet to have any chance of working, it needs to fulfill at least two primary criteria:

1. It must cause an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure. Most diet books focus on the diet end of things but some use activity to increase expenditure. But if there is no caloric deficit, nothing will happen.

2. There must be adequate dietary protein

Other stuff such as essential fatty acids are also critical but other aspects of the diet (carb intake, timing, meal frequency) is all debatable and arguable and depends on the specifics. I’d note, of course, that every diet (and book) I have written adheres to this on some level or another. Caloric intake is the key aspect, protein intake is the second crucial aspect (in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook I actually let protein intake set caloric intake in reverse), you get your EFA’s and then you worry about everything else.

Now, most effective weight loss diets will probably adhere to 1 and 2 on some level. Whether the caloric restriction is spelled out explicitly or not is irrelevant, as long as it occurs it’s fine on some level. Most diet books don’t recommend sufficient protein but this is changing in recent times.

So given that tons of diets still adhere to 1 and 2, why do most still fail. Finally, that’s what I can start talking about in the next post.

Frankly, in a lot of ways, I think addressing the psychological aspects of dieting is far far more important than the physiology or nutrient metabolism or what have you. Simply put, at this point, with 40+ years of dedicated nutritional research, I think we have a pretty good idea of what is required for a diet to generate weight or fat loss.

Yes, we can always quibble about the details of what the ‘perfect’ fat loss diet should or shouldn’t be but when you start looking, you start to realize that there is no single perfect diet.

Issues of genetics, insulin resistance, food preference, how much and what kind of training, etc. all factor in to determine what diet might be best for any given individual. A relatively lean individual involved in high intensity training daily will have a different requirement for an ‘ideal’ diet than someone at 40% body fat who isn’t exercising.

There is also the additional factor that, when you get right down to it, any diet that adheres to some very basic principles should ‘work’ to at least some degree or another.

If you don’t believe me, go pick up any half a dozen different diet books. Odds are they will all have wildly differing recommendations, at least at first glance. But they will all be able to trot out case studies of someone who did amazingly well on it. How can that be?

When you start breaking it down to fundamental principles, anything that works to any degree will invariably share the same principles. This isn’t much different than how it works with training mind you, if you focus more on the principles of a given training system and don’t get hung up over the details, you generally find that all successful programs adhere to the same basic principles. The details almost cease to matter as long as those basics are right.

To put this in perspective, I vividly remember reading this review paper a bunch of years ago addressing the issue of the optimal diet for obesity. I’d note that this is a paper essentially reviewing 30 years of research data to the tune of lord knows how many millions of dollars.

Their conclusion was something to the effect of “While we may not know the ideal diet for the treatment of obesity, it will probably be based around plenty of lean protein and vegetables, moderate amounts of carbohydrates and fat.”

I call this the “My grandmother knew that” approach to dieting and I’m surprised someone hasn’t written “The Grandmother Diet” since everybody knows that their grandmother knows everything about everything.

In any case, fundamentally, this isn’t a bad sound bite. The problem in modern society is both

1. Getting people to eat that way in the first place.
2. Getting them to keep eating that way in the long-term.

And, in a lot of ways, ‘b’ is probably the more important of the two. Everybody knows that all diets will work in the short-term. Where dieting invariably fails for most people is in long-term adherence. People fall off the bandwagon for a variety of reasons.

This is what I’m going to discuss over the next series of blog posts.

In this chapter, I want to discuss some two of the primary ways that dieters tend to sabotage their own efforts on a diet, that is the way that dieters fail diets. These two ways are being too absolute and expecting perfection and by thinking only in the short-term.

And before you complain about how bad it is form wise to write a short introductory paragraph instead of just going straight into the text, I’ll defend my style choice by explaining that I don’t like starting a chapter with a bold-faced sub-category. So there.

Too Absolute/Expecting Perfection

Perhaps the single biggest reason I have found for dieters failing in their diet effects is that many dieters try to be far too absolute in their approach to the diet something I alluded to in the foreword. When these people are on their diet they are ON THE DIET(!!!). Which is altogether fine as long as they stay on the diet. The problem is that any slip, no matter how small, is taken as complete and utter failure. The diet is abandoned and the post-diet food binge begins. As I’ve said repatedly, this tends to puts the fat (and frequently a little extra) back on faster than before.

We have all either known (or been) the following person: one cookie eaten in a moment of weakness or distraction, the guilt sets in, and the rest of the bag is GONE (perhaps inhaled is the proper word). Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, right? Psychologists refer to such individuals as rigid dieters, they see the world in a rather extreme right or wrong approach, either they are on their diet, and 100% perfection is expected, or they are off their diet, shovelling crap in as fast as it will go. I’m quite sure this type of attitude is not limited to dieting, probably any behavior you care to name finds people at one extreme or the other.

As a side note, you can oftentimes see the same attitude with people starting an exercise program. The first few weeks go great, workouts are going well, then a single workout is missed. The person figures that any benefits are lost because of missing that one workout and they never go back to the gym.

Now, I could probably go on for pages about this one topic but I’ll spare you the verbiage. My main point out that there are times (most of them) when obsessive dedication or the expectation of perfection becomes a very real source of failure. Sure, if it drives you towards better and better results, such an attitude will work. But only until you finally slip. Note that I said ‘until you slip’ not ‘if you slip’. In most cases, it’s a matter of when, not if you’re going to break your diet. There are exceptions, some of which I’ll mention below, but for the majority of dieters, I would say that expecting perfection is pretty much expecting failure.

If you take the attitude that anything less than absolute perfection is a failure, you’re pretty much doomed from the start. Now, there are some exceptions, places where results have to obtained in a very short time frame and you can’t really accept mistakes. Athletes who have a short time to get to a certain level of bodyfat or muscle mass, for whom victory or defeat may hinge on their ability to suffer for long enough are one. I mentioned some others in my last booklet, individuals who have to accomplish some drastic goal in a very short period of time; even there I included some deliberate breaks for both psychological and physiological reasons. But in the grand majority of cases, this type of obsessive, no-exceptions attitude tends to cause more problems that it solves.

Keeping with this idea, psychologists frequently talk about something called the 80/20 principle which says that ‘If you’re doing what you’re supposed to do 80% of the time, the othe 20% doesn’t matter’. While there are certainly exceptions (try avoiding crack or heroin for 80% of the time), it certainly applies to dieting and exercise under the grand majority of conditions.

If the changes you’ve made to your diet and exercise program stay solid for 80% of the time, the other 20% is no big deal. Not unless you make it one. And that’s really the issue, that 20% problem only becomes one if the dieter decides (either consciously or unconciously) to make it a problem. Once again, the exception is for those folks under strict time frames, who don’t have the option to screw up. For everyone else, seeking perfection means seeking failure.

Focusing Only on the Short-Term

The second primary way that dieters fail diets is focusing only on the short-term and this applies in a couple of different ways. The first is a reality issue. Ignoring diets promising quick easy weight loss (my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook caused rapid weight loss, a great deal of which was water, but it sure isn’t an easy diet), about the best you can usually do with true fat loss is somewhere between 1.5-3 lbs/week (heavier individuals can lose more).

Sure you can drop a lot more total weight if you factor in water weight and other contributors but true fat loss typically peaks at about that rate (some lighter women may have trouble even losing one pound of fat per week)

For the sake of example, let’s say 2 lbs/week can be reasonably expected for a fatter individual. For someone with a large amount of fat to lose, 50 or 100 pounds, this may mean one-half to a full year of dieting. Possibly more since it’s rare to see perfectly linear fat loss without stalls or plateaus.

Consider the reality of that, you may have to alter eating and exercise habits for nearly a year just to reach your goal. Do you really expect to be hungry and deprived for that entire period? I thought not. If you have a lot of weight/fat to lose, you need to start thinking in thte long-term, you will need to make changes to diet or activity (or both) and maintain them in the long-term.

As a second issue: a lot of dieters seem to think that once they have lost the weight with one diet or another, they can revert to their old habits and keep the weight off. So they change their eating habits drastically, drop the weight and then go right back to the way of eating that made them fat. And, to their apparent surprise, they get fat again. “You can never go back again.” as the old saying goes. If you go back to the diet and exercise habits that made you fat in the first place, you’ll just get fat again.

This actually makes a profound argument for making small, livable changes to your eating and activity habits and avoiding the type of extreme approach that I described in my last booklet. The simple reason being that small changes seem to be easier to maintain in the long-term, even if they don’t generate results as rapidly. And that’s actually sort of the trade-off, the types of small changes that tends to be sustainable in the long-term tend to cause weight/fat loss that is so painfully slow (or minimal) as to be almost irrelevant; and the types of extreme approaches that generate rapid results tend to be nearly impossible to stick to in the long-term. In my last booklet, my compromise was to use the Rapid Weight Loss approach as a short-term approach and then use it to move into a maintenance approach. But I digress.

At the end of the day, here’s the painful reality that all dieters must come to terms with: the only way to both lose fat AND maintain that loss in the long-term is to maintain at least some of the diet and exercise habits you changed in the long-term. Forever, basically even though that’s a little too depressing to consider. Maybe we should just think long-term instead. Hopefully we’ll get genetic engineering soon enough to make it a not-forever kind of deal.

Dieters (or anyone seeking to change a long-standing behavior) must stop thinking of diets as a short-term behavior change, you’ll have to maintain at least some of those changes in the long-term. Now, I’ll point out here that the strategies used for weight/fat loss and maintenance aren’t necessarily going to be the same (nor should they be). As I talked about in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, there are situations where an extreme diet can be used initially and used to move into a proper maintenance phase. A lot of diet researchers and diet book authors miss this point, thinking that the diet that you followed to lose the weight/fat must or should be the same as the one you use to maintain that loss.

I do think it’s helpful is the diet that caused the fat loss can be used to move into a maintenance approach (again, something I discussed in some detail in the last booklet and will make mention of in this one) but they needn’t be the same. If eliminating all of the carbohdyrates from your diet makes it easier to lose fat in the long run, and you are able to move back to a maintenance diet that contains some carbohydrates, I don’t see what the problem is. Once again, the diet you use to lose the fat doesn’t necessarily have to be thes same diet as you use to maintain that fat loss. If nothing else, you get to eat more when you move back to maintenance, the types of foods you allow yourself may change as well.

Summing up this section, it’s not that diets per se fail, it’s that diets that are only followed short-term fail. The body is really good at storing incoming calories as fat after a diet and if you return to old eating habits, you can just watch the pounds come flying back on.

To hopefully cement this point in your mind, studies of successful dieters (those who have lost weight and kept it off for some period of time, usually 2-5 years) have shown several very consistent behaviour patterns of which this is one: they maintain the dietary and exercise changes they have made in the long-term. If you’re not going to maintain at least some of your changed dietary and exercise habits in the long-term, you might as well not bother (with one major exception discussed below).

One Exception to the Comments Aabove

There is, however, one major exception to the above that I should probably mention (and that I discuss in greater detail in my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook). There are individuals who, for whatever reason, only have to be in shape for a very short period of time, a day or three at the most, who don’t necessarily care if the results are maintained long-term or not.

Usually it’s a bodybuilder preparing for a contest, or even a model who has a particularly important photo shoot. Or a woman who needs to drop 20 lbs for her wedding or a male who needs to impress people at his high school reunion. Even athletes who have to make a weight class sometimes have to do scary stuff to get where they need to be, usally involving fluid restriction and frequently severe dehydration. But the consequences of not making weight (whatever they may be) are greater than the extreme approaches that tend to be used.

In situations like that, whether it’s healthy or not, extremely restrictive and/or even slightly dangerous approaches are frequently used. We may not like them, we may not condone them but sometimes the ends justifies the means because a few pounds may mean the difference in getting a big paycheck/winning the contest/looking good in your wedding gown or not.

In these situations, long-term maintenance isn’t necessarily the goal. No sane bodybuilder expects to maintain contest shape year-round, and no weight class athlete expects to maintain a severe state of dehydration year round. They get in shape for their event, and relax to some degree for the rest of the time. So the above sections really are aimed at the person looking to lose fat and keep it off long-term.

In that case, where maintenance is just as important as the loss itself, absolute attitudes and focusing only on the short-term hurt far more than they help, and should be avoided as much as possible. In addition to the strategies I’m going to discuss in this booklet, this means taking a very different attitude towards dieting. First you have to let go of your absolutist attitudes, which can be hard. Second, you need to start taking the long-view to both your weight loss and dietary and exercise habits. I’ll come back to this in later chapters.