At the time of lose weight many people rely on diet as another component of the small daily rituals that must be followed to have the desired body At some point, some of these people will decide to stop pretending that they are meeting the goals on their weekly eating chart and will return to honestly embracing a life of carbs and junk food.
Others, however, will manage to follow the diet until they discover, months later, that not only has it not worked for them but they have also gained weight. Why is this happening? Traci Mann from the University of Minnesota, explains part of this mystery in his book Secrets from the Eating Lab: the science of weight loss, the myth of willpower, and why you should never diet again.
The title of the book may seem very forceful, but the truth is that Mann does not suggest that it does not matter what you eat. Evidently Having a diet based on industrial pastries and pizzas is not the same as sticking to a diet plan in which legumes, nuts and fruit make up 80% of what we eat. What the psychologist actually suggests is that diets are ineffective on their own, because they do not contemplate psychological strategies to lose weight: they only indicate the raw materials that must be used.
Actually, this doesn’t sound crazy. If we think of diets as if they were a kind of product that we buy and apply directly, we probably do the latter wrong, by giving the diet the power to make us lose weight and ignore everything else. Specifically, we will be overlooking the mechanisms of self control that we should be using and whose absence can make us blind to the continuous failures when it comes to following good food planning.
Traci Mann assures that to understand why diets are not effective, we must first recognize that each person has a different way of assimilating food, and that the latter is largely determined by our genetics
Many people tend to create large layers of fat, and the opposite is true for others Thus, the human body does not have a “center” to which it naturally tends, because we are all different. When a person tries to lose weight to get closer to that fictitious “center point”, his body feels unbalanced and makes efforts to adapt to the new situation.
One of the side effects of this struggle to adapt to a lower calorie diet is stress. The body tries to keep us alert and seek out new sources of calories, which, as you might expect, encourages more trips to the fridge.
Diets take our habitual eating habits and subtract them, but they do not consider the compensatory exercise that our body does to counteract with small daily sums such as snacking between meals. In the end, it is possible that with the diet we are eating both the foods that the meal plan proposes and the occasional snacks that stress generates and that we are capable of overlooking or underestimating, without realizing that we only eat so much between meals since that we begin to impose a certain type of daily menu on ourselves.
It is useless to think about willpower
Another idea in the book is that it is not practical to make one of the fundamental elements in compliance with the diet the willpower Mann believes that willpower has been mythologized into a kind of agent whose role is to give orders to the rest of the body, as if it had power over it.
However, this idea of ”willpower” ceases to be important when we realize that no component of our body is capable of giving orders unilaterally, without receiving pressure from the rest of the body. Specifically, Mann believes that this concept only exists to have something to blame when something doesn’t work. It is something like the hole under the carpet in which is hidden what is not convenient for us to explain.
To do?
A useful theoretical model to explain our relationship with diet is one that does not depend on an idea as abstract as willpower and that accepts that we must put limits on the desire to lose weight if you do not want to lose health, due to the role our genes play. Therefore, each person should focus on achieving a tolerable point of thinness, but no more.
From there, the point is to control the quality of what you eat, but rather focus on following strategies to avoid falling into an unacceptably high carbohydrate temptation. These strategies cannot rely almost anything on willpower, since it will bend in favor of the adaptation mechanisms dictated by genetics.
What Mann proposes is to pursue goals that indirectly distance us from tempting caloric intakes.
Some of these strategies are purely psychological, such as replacing thoughts about a cake with thoughts that include whole wheat bread or a food with even fewer carbohydrates. Others, however, are related to materially changing our environment. For example, hiding or throwing away junk food in the house, or making it difficult to access this food. In this way, the desire for food with carbohydrates will be surpassed by another tendency that is also very human: the laziness of going looking for food. They are all benefits!
