The Diet Trap: Why Quick Fixes Fail and Sustainable Change Wins

Music.

And welcome to Change Your Relationship with Food, the podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley. With many years experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing. Just a quick word before we start. I'm very excited to tell you that we are a nominee in the Women in Podcasting Awards.

I would be so grateful if you could just take five minutes to just cast a vote for us. We're under the psychology section, but I will put a link in the episode notes today that will take you straight through it. It's just five minutes. It costs you nothing to do, and it would make a huge difference to the show. It would enable us to get more guests on, to spend more money advertising to make the content better. So please, five minutes of your time. I'd be so grateful.

Thanks so much. Let's get on with the show today.

When people first come to see me, I often start off by asking a few background questions like, how did you hear about me? What brought you here? What are you thinking the problem is coming into this appointment? Appointment, what do you want as far as outcomes, you know, those sort of gentle feeling my way questions.

I might ask a little bit about their home life, who they live with, what sort of relationship they're in or not, who does the cooking at home, who does the shopping, you know, just to get a little bit of an idea in their life. And invariably, one of the subjects that we get onto quite quickly is their diet history. And quite often, they give me a whole list of all these different diet clubs that they've joined, things like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig.

Some of them have bought books that they've followed. Some of them have signed up to online courses and online membership clubs where they get tracked and they log food and things like that. So there's all these different solutions out there that this person has tried, sometimes over 20 or 30 years of dieting history. One thing that's very common, though, generally with most of the people that come to see me is that they are often at their highest weight right now.

So somehow over the years, engaging in all these solutions, they haven't actually lost weight and kept it off. In fact, what's happened over that time is they've gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and they've gained more and more and more weight. Quite often people get to me, they have these one-to-one sessions.

And I think generally we try first all these low cost options, things that seem low cost, as in, if I buy a book for, say, $30, and I believe that that $30 book is the key to my long-term weight control success, then, you know, that's pretty good value, isn't it? One book, a lifelong control of my weight, you know, absolute bargain. And that's why people do this. They buy a $30 book and then they join a club, which is maybe $20 a week or a month or something like that.

All these little low-cost options in the belief that somehow they're going to achieve this elusive long-term result. And it started to occur to me that I could actually have made a lot more money over the years if I had written one of these diet books. Instead Instead of doing what I do and trying to persuade people not to diet. What if I had just cashed in all my ethics and decided, no, I'm going to write a diet book. I'm going to make a fortune.

I'm going to retire to some tropical island somewhere and live off the profits without any shame whatsoever.

So let's have some fun with this and see what I would actually have to do to achieve that end. Because this is what happens time and time again. And I don't want you to be fooled by the next big idea that comes out.

So run with me on this one what I'm going to do I'm going to invent a new miracle diet and what can I call it I'll think of a snappy name in a second but what I need to do essentially when I'm going to write my new miracle diet book is I have to come up with a new way of wrapping up an old idea and the old idea is basically calorie restriction somehow I've got to wrap that up in a new way that will make people buy my book.

So let me think about that. And I'm thinking of examples that I've seen over the years. There was things like the blood group diet. I don't know if any of you remember that one from a few years ago. This idea was wrapped up in a you've been eating wrong for your blood group type philosophy. The idea that, well, if you're O negative and you've not been eating that way and you've been eating a positive type food, well, of course, there's going to be a problem.

Let me tell you what foods to eat for your blood group. And it sold probably a few million copies, I don't know. But the author of that book, whoever they are, probably had a happy bank balance after the publication of that one. So let's think of a new way to wrap it up for my book. And let's think of something like... I want people only to eat breakfast. That's it. That's going to be my spin on calorie restriction. And I'm going to call the book, Good Morning, Perfect Body.

There you go. That's the example. That's what I'm going to run with.

So my idea of my miracle book is going to be that you wake up each morning, you have a huge breakfast and that's it. You don't eat for the rest of the day. that sounds ridiculous but I think it's out there I think I have heard of such a book I don't know whether it was based around breakfast but I remember when intermittent fasting first started to become very very popular and there was variations on that theme of intermittent dieting there was the 16-8 diet.

I did hear of one which was the sort of 23-1 diet, the idea that you ate for an hour a day and then fasted for 23 other hours a day. So my new Miracle Diet book is not such a crazy idea. So let's run with this. What was it called? Good Morning Perfect Body. That's what I'm going to call it. So I've come up with my theme. I'm going to sell calorie restriction in a way that nobody has ever heard of before.

So the first thing I have to do is create a big fuss about this book I've written. So ideally, I want it plastered all over social media. I need to get some influencers on board with those before and after photos. You know, the ones where it's black and white, bad lighting, everyone looks miserable in the before photo and then afterwards, beautiful lighting, colour, hair and makeup, fantastic. Person breathing in, quickly take the photo. So that's the after photo.

So I'm going to have a few of those doing the rounds. I also need an influencer to try one of my breakfast recipes because I'll write a few recipes for my book, obviously, to make it sound like it's kind of new and different and doable. And I'll get an influencer to sit and eat breakfast and say how great they feel. Ideally, I want them wearing that pingy sort of active wear. And maybe I can have my own line in that activewear as well and sell a few of those. I can see that happening.

And so this is all the fuss I want to kind of get on board about my book. I'm going to have a good cover for the book, something eye-catching. I think Good Morning Perfect Body is probably pretty eye-catching. That'll jump off the shelf.

A nice picture of somebody on the cover looking young and gorgeous that will probably sell it as well and ideally hey if I could get a celebrity on board as well someone to actually trial my diet so that they could be out there red carpet events looking gorgeous saying that they owe it all to the good morning perfect body written by Kyla. Okay, so I've got all that organized. Fantastic. Now, what happens is that people will go out and buy my book.

I might have a little online course going at the same time where they can join up. And the chances are, because they will approach my diet with great enthusiasm in the first few weeks, they will lose some weight and they will start to think, well, hey, this works. They will also so get noticed. Their friends at work or on the school run or in college or uni, something like that will go, hey, look at you. You've lost a bit of weight. What have you been up to?

And they will say, I bought a book. It's called Good Morning Perfect Body. And I really feel that I'm doing brilliantly on it. I've lost five kilos already and I'm having a fantastic time. And this is great. And the book was only 30 bucks. Fantastic. And what will happen is off the back of that personal recommendation, more people will go out and buy my book.

Happy days. This is the peak sales time for me because not only am I getting the social media that I planted, but I'm now getting word of mouth as well. This is fantastic. So now my book is selling. It could even be a bestseller. It could be up there with the major ones over the past few years. We could be looking at sort of my own personal cabbage soup success or Atkins, for instance. Oh, my God, I could be as good as Dr. Atkins by now. Wouldn't that be fabulous?

Or the South Beach Diet that sold millions of copies. Perhaps I'll be as good as that. So I'm riding the wave at the moment. I'm I'm selling perhaps millions of my book because I've discovered something new and interesting about a really old idea of calorie deficit.

Now, what happens now, though, is a few months after the launch, we go into a bit of a quiet phase. Book sales might hold up for a little while, but the whole interest in my book and the chatter about it and the social media shares is starting to die down. Down and everybody that's lost a bit of weight on my book, they're starting to regain their weight now. Oh dear. Okay. But fortunately, they're all keeping quiet about it because nobody really says anything.

When they start to regain that weight, instead of kicking up a fuss and writing to me and saying, hey, I want a refund. Luckily, they all feel a bit of shame around this weight gain, which is great for me. The fact that my Good Morning Perfect Body book was kind of never going to work. And I kind of knew that. The fact is that none of them are blaming me because now they're all blaming themselves. This is brilliant. So what happens is.

I can basically just walk away now. Most of the people that have parted with their $30 for my book are now back to the weight that they started at, perhaps a little bit more than that. And also, I'm not to blame. I can just walk away. And what normally happens is another book will come along to fill that space. So by now, the reason that my book sales have dropped and my book is $2.99 in the bargain bin is because another one has come along to take its place.

Something that's now riding its own wave while my book subtly disappears. But it doesn't matter because I've made millions of dollars. So I get away with doing that absolutely scot-free. There's no comeback on me. I just relax and reflect on my moment in the sun when I wrote a best-selling diet book. This is kind of the perfect crime, isn't it? Because it's not my fault, it's your fault. I can blame you, the reader, for this happening to you.

And the chances are that most of my readers would have regained the weight that they lost and then gained a little bit more.

And what they don't know and what I don't tell them, because I may write a second version of my book that I'll want to sell again, so I don't want to let them in on the secret, that what has happened to them is a normal metabolic consequence of dieting. The weight has returned to its set point. And not only that, that we've actually raised the set point in the longer term in the aftermath of weight loss from a low calorie diet.

And the reason that there are so many diet books out there is that none of them considers the the master controller of our weight, which is our weight set point. And that's why none of the diet books seem to work long term. And that's why there's so many failed miracle diet books out there, cluttering up the sort of two for one section of the bookstore. And mine will end up there as well, along with all the other ones that I've mentioned.

Because at the end of the day, your weight will always return to its predetermined set point if you subject it to a short-term calorie deficit. Our bodies can't tell whether we've put ourself in this situation voluntarily, as in we've chosen to go on a diet, or whether we're in this situation involuntarily, as in there's a famine out there or for some reason we can't access food. So our body steps in to protect us. It will lower our metabolic rate. It will increase our hunger signals.

And ultimately, it will return us to our set weight. It's a sort of subconscious process, just like our breathing. When you think about it, if you try to exert restriction over your breathing, if you try and hold your breath, you can only hold your breath for a short period of time.

The longer you try and hold your breath, the more difficult it becomes, the more your body says, oh, for God's sake, breathe, breathe, breathe, until eventually you take a huge breath in to send your breathing back to where it came from, back into that regular subconscious pattern that it's happy sitting in the whole time. And the same happens to your weight. You can deny food to your body, but eventually you will kind of break, if you like, because that calorie restriction is too extreme.

And generally what happens following that period of what people then perceive as deprivation, they perceive it that way in their mind as well as their body, they then go into this period of overindulgence, overcompensation for what they've just suffered. And they will eat often more after finishing a diet at a time when their metabolic rate has dropped down. So guess what happens? Not only do they regain the weight, they actually gain a little bit extra.

You're probably asking yourself now, how do we avoid this? What do we do instead? Let's think about the possibility of going straight to the maintenance plan. What I mean by that is that most people, when they embark on the diet, what they anticipate is they'll have a period of severe restriction. That's what we tend to sign up for. And then they say, once I lose the weight, I'll just be sensible. So what if we went straight to sensible? What would happen there?

Have a think what sensible would look like. Would it look like, okay, if I had the body that I wanted, maybe I would just, I would cut down on the fast food. Maybe I would make sure that I took a couple of walks every week. Maybe I would try and do more cooking from scratch at home. What would maintenance look like? Decide that first. And once you've decided maintenance, what would happen if you went straight to maintenance instead of putting the calorie restriction in beforehand.

What if you made those little maintenance changes without having that big weight loss? Initially, making these changes won't result in any weight loss whatsoever. And in fact, if you're increasing your exercise, and especially if it's resistance exercise and you're building muscle, you may actually find that your weight goes up slightly during this period.

But what will happen slowly is that if you continue with better dietary habits and a few little exercise habits, eventually the message gets through to your weight set point. And after some months, that set point would actually go down. And maybe many months later, you would actually be four and a half, five, six kilos lighter than when you'd started maybe a year ago. This doesn't sound like much weight loss, but what you're actually doing here

is lowering your set point very gently. You're not shocking your body into sending that set point up. You're enticing your body into lowering that set point gradually. And unfortunately, this doesn't fall into the category that everyone wants. Everyone wants the 10 kilos loss in 10 weeks type thing. That's what they sign up for. But that is temporary weight loss. And in the long term, it's permanent weight gain.

So think about this differently. Think about perhaps if you've invested 20 years in endless diets with your weight going up and down and up and down and up and down, and ultimately your weight's a lot higher.

What if you had instead invested those 20 years in gently lowering your set point? Where would you be now? And trust me, you wouldn't be at your highest weight. So I know it's very boring to say that this is a slow process. I know everyone wants to fix this within a few weeks, but it's not doable. And think of all the time you've wasted up to now. Is it a year? Is it five years? Is it 10 years?

Is it 20 years? Or even more of wasted time on these diet promises that don't end up paying off long term. Think of how much money you've put into the pockets of people who've written the books and run the diet clubs and sold you those elusive dreams that were simply not obtainable. It's time to see that all that's happening in those situations is that we are being manipulated. A carrot is being dangled in front of us, literally a carrot, because that's what we're told to eat a lot of the time.

But these carrots are dangled in front of us and these long-term dreams are sold through these books and they simply don't work long-term. We're being sold a lie.

So have a think about this. I don't want to be all doom and gloom. I feel I've been a bit doom and gloom today, but I really don't want to be.

What I'm trying to sell, if I have a product to sell, is realism, a realistic product, a way of you managing your weight long term without getting into the dieting trap. And that may not be as glamorous as those before and after photos, but do you want that or do you want something that works? Until next week, my friends, I will speak to you then. Bye-bye. Thank you so much for your company today. I would also love it if you could follow this podcast. It really does mean a lot to me.

Also, we have a six-week online change your relationship with food course that you can take. Just visit www.acfeb.com and click on the ACFEB and me courses link. There's also a journal and a workbook available on Amazon, and you'll find that link in our bio. I really hope you can join me again next week. Goodbye. Music.