HOW TO BREAK THE YO-YO DIETING CYCLE

Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my life on a diet. My first one started at 13, and sparked a life-long obsession with dieting as I tried to understand the mechanics of cravings and appetite and the relationship between what we eat and how we feel.

We live in a diet-obsessed culture, where thinness and aesthetic perfection are celebrated and desired. Yet food is everywhere, all of the time. And most of it isn’t good for us and is even proven to make us eat more than we need.

Like many, I just about figured out what worked for me in my 30s and early 40s. And that meant being able to maintain a weight range I was happy with, whilst having enough calories left to drink as much alcohol as I wanted when I went out. When my weight crept up past what I was OK with, I just went to Weight Watchers until I was back to where I wanted to be. Not that this meant I was happy with my body. Not at all. I hated everything from the waist down and felt permanently self-conscious, whilst examining them at any chance I had, reinforcing my views of how big I was and constantly comparing myself unfavourably to other women who to my mind, all had longer, slimmer legs than me.

At this point in my life I consider myself an expert in dieting. I have studied this subject more intently than anything else for over 30 years! But the real breakthroughs for me came at a time of my life when everything I knew stopped working. Oh the irony.

The two things that led to this breakthrough were perimenopause and becoming a personal trainer and learning about the struggles of other women.

Firstly, during perimenopause, your body is fundamentally changing the way it works. From a body composition perspective, the ratio of fat to muscle starts to change creating more fat and less muscle. The diets that worked before aren’t always effective.

Secondly, we often struggle with dieting in secret. Ashamed that we want to diet, ashamed of our eating habits and ashamed that we don’t put enough effort in to stick with it. In my self-focused shame, I assumed no-one understood my struggles and that everything was my fault.

Well, I’d like to call time on that because I now know it’s bullshit. We all struggle and IT’S NOT OUR FAULT. We live in a complex world, our hormones are changing, the stress we are under is insane and our eating and shopping decisions are massively influenced by retailers, advertisers, friends and family.

The first step in breaking the cycle of restriction, cravings and guilt is to understand the dieting cycle and why we struggle. And that’s what we are going to do here.

The 5 STAGES of Dieting

1. EXCITEMENT

Deciding to go on a diet is characterized by being highly motivated and excited about the possibility of becoming slimmer. At the point the decision is made we become highly engaged with whatever we need to do; new recipes, meal plans, shopping lists. We soak up all the information we can about calories, protein, and success stories.

In this motivated and determined state, we can cope with feeling hungry and saying no to favourite foods. During those first, focused weeks, we’re likely to lose a decent amount of weight fuelling the motivation to keep going.

We’re on top of it all; organised and feeling the progress. The excitement is palpable and there’s real hope that this time we’ve cracked it.

2. LIFE HAPPENS

Sooner or later, something happens that throws you off track. It could be something big or something small, anything that causes you stress or gets in the way of your plans to exercise or eat healthily. We don’t always realise we use food to cope with stress or numb us from feeling frustrated. So when stress picks up, we run back to our old ways. We eat the wrong things. We feel guilty and frustrated by not being able to stick to our diet and to punish ourselves, we binge.

3. SELF-BLAME

Once the diet is broken we decide we’ve failed. Gone are the excitement and enthusiasm from a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re furious with ourselves. For not having the willpower, for being lazy, for not being organised enough. However we look at it, it’s down to our personal failings and we overlook the real reasons we can’t stick to a diet. This is why I wrote my book, Why Women Over 40 Can’t Lose Weight. By simply blaming ourselves for not being good enough we never really understand the root causes of our struggle with food.

4. RETURN TO OLD HABITS

Disillusioned with the diet and angry with ourselves, our motivation to stick with the diet has gone and we soon go back to our old, familiar habits, consoling ourselves with the very things we know aren’t doing us good. We might stay here for a long time because change feels too hard with everything that’s going on in our lives.

5. THE SEARCH FOR THE NEXT DIET

Despite our failure (even though we’ve not learnt from it), we’re still unhappy with how we’re eating and plagued with guilt. Maybe the weight is still creeping up or we’re feeling lethargic and bloated. The search for the next diet begins and the whole cycle starts again.

BREAKING THE CYCLE

What do we mean by breaking the cycle of yo-yo dieting?

Most people simply want to be able to stick to a healthier diet for the long term. So how do you achieve this?

Change the Goal

The first thing is to change the goal. When we diet, the goal is usually weight loss. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight, but the problem with this as the only goal is that you have to put a lot of work in for a long time before you see results. Even if you do lose weight, you’ll just see a slightly smaller version of the same body when you look in the mirror. For those of us who’ve spent decades finding fault with every part of us, losing weight won’t always solve the problem. We still won’t be happy.

When the goal is about taking care of ourselves; finding more energy, sleeping better, being able to think clearer, fuelling our exercise passions or stopping insatiable cravings, the results come faster. Within a couple of days of eating a more balanced diet, you’ll notice improvements in many of these things and this provides instant, powerful motivation to keep going, because you’re not waiting for the results - you’re experiencing them every day, and these benefits are truly life-changing.

CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT FOOD

The benefits I mentioned in the last paragraph don’t come from a restrictive diet. They come from fueling yourself properly. If you’ve listened to any of my podcast episodes, you’ll know that lots of women don’t eat enough. When you start thinking about food as something that will fuel your day, eating takes on a new meaning. Dieting and restriction means trying to cope with constant feelings of hunger and deprivation. Fuelling, by contrast, means eating to feel full and satisfied so you can stop obsessing about food and get on with living.

LIFE HAPPENS - DROP THE GUILT

The biggest mistake we make is basing on plans on being 100% in control all of the time. That’s never going to happen. If you want to truly break the cycle and find a way of eating you can stick with long term you absolutely have to let go of trying to achieve perfection. It’s always half-term, or someone’s birthday. There will always be work stress, nights out planned and holidays. The kids will always need ferrying about and most weeks you’ll feel knackered. You have to work with this, and the best way to do this is to start by making small changes that are easy to fit into your week (such as trying this 5 day breakfast and lunch plan). Then, when things don’t go to plan, remember it’s OK. Have the takeaway, make do with what you have in the freezer. Drop the guilt. Just start again when you can.

STOP BLAMING YOURSELF AND START LEARNING ABOUT YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD

At some point, you’ll struggle, because there are many reasons why we don’t make good food choices. It might be out of habit or because of pressure from friends or family. It could be a coping mechanism for dealing with stress, anxiety and boredom. Maybe it’s down to not having the right foods in, or knowing what a healthy diet actually looks like for you. You have to learn about what’s holding you back or thwarting your efforts and find ways to manage that.

For example, today I was recording a new podcast. The lady I was speaking to ate a healthy diet, but was snacking on biscuits throughout the day. She worked from home, so it was easy to fall into the habit of having a break from the laptop to make a cup of tea and grab a few biscuits. She had a busy family life, and when I asked her what things she did for herself to give herself pleasure during the day, she couldn’t think of any. We all need pleasure and rewards for working so hard. If we try and take away the only bit of pleasure we get in a day (eating a few biscuits) we won’t be able to stick with it unless we find another way of treating ourselves that allows us to strike a balance between work and pleasure.

NEW FOR January

Join me for a new 10-Week programme starting in January 2024. This programme is designed to change your mindset around food and to help you make small but doable changes to your diet that get big results.

You’ll get support to create your own food boundaries so you can find the balance between eating for health and eating for enjoyment, without falling back into the ‘good-day-bad-day’ mindset.

You’ll get one-to-one coaching with me. We’re all unique and this will ensure you find a way of eating that works for you and your lifestyle. I’ll provide you with recipes and meal plans so you can be sure you’re eating a balanced, nutritious diet. You’ll also get access to a 10-week exercise programme which starts small at first, to keep stress and overwhelm to a minimum, which you can build on when you are ready.

Places are limited because of the one-to-one coaching element. If you are interested in this, then fill in the form below for more information and to be added to the waiting list. When registration opens you will be first to be notified.