An Introduction to the Psychology and Physiology of Dieting
In the next series of articles, I want to take a look at some aspects of dieting, both physiological and psychological.
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
- Getting people to eat that way in the first place.
- 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.
Learn more about the psychology and physiology behind dieting failures.
There are a lot of reasons that diets fail but one of the biggest is that people expect nothing less than perfection. Any break in their diet and they figure that they've failed completely; the post diet binge begins.
What if I told you that it didn't have to be this way, that taking a deliberately more flexible approach to your diet could make it work more effectively in the long term?
A Guide to Flexible Dieting can help you succeed on your diet this time around by teaching you how being less strict can make it work better. You'll learn how to incorporate free meals, refeeds and even a full diet break (a 1-2 week period where you go off your diet).
I’m looking forward to this series. I was a chunk all my life, eating poorly for 35 years. One day, something clicked at I was able to lose the extra weight straight out and keep it off (5+ years now).. Maybe I’ll find out what it was that finally clicked.
I am looking forward to it too – this is one series I am going to enjoy reading about.
[...] 2 Most Important Diet Rules Lyle Mcdonald writes: [...]
Not that he was a body builder or anything, but I think Bruce Lee had one of the leanest physiques of any human to walk the earth when he died in the 1970s. I’m pretty sure he was doping too,..although his muscles were definately falling off by Enter the Dragon.
Interestingly here in the UK there has been a great deal made of how “healthy” people were during WW2, and how the wartime diet contributed to this.
This diet was very much at odds with the “Grandmother” diet – there were a LOT of vegetables, but largely green leafy ones and roots, and seasonal fruits, combined with (relatively) very low levels of protein and very little fat. The bulk of diet (in volume, mass frequency of serving and calories!) came from potatoes and bread, which were off-ration. This is the antithesis of the “good” diet described here, but “fitness” resulting from it was good, apparently. Is the take home message that if you work people hard enough they will be “fit” (BMI wise – the measure being used here) regardless of the dietary composition (provided it’s somehat restricted)?