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The Diet is Dead. Long Live the Diet

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If you’ve ever been on a weight loss diet, you know how difficult it is to stay the course, achieve your target weight, and then maintain it for months and years. The majority of dieters fail to maintain their low weight for over a year.

For many, a diet means a temporary sacrifice and inconvenience in order to reach a certain goal (Weddings, bikini season, etc..). But unlike other one time sacrifices – working as a teen all summer long to save up money to buy a car, or spending 4 years crunching textbooks to get an engineering degree – once you’ve achieved your goal, you’ve got to continue working hard to maintain it.

Jennifer LaRue Huget, Washington Post’s Eat Drink and Be Healthy blogger, has a great piece on a current trend:

…a subtle shift in the diet-guidance market: Instead of prescribing eating regimens, many weight-loss experts are suggesting that we reevaluate our relationship with food, focus on eating healthful whole foods and use psychology to aid our efforts to shed pounds. read more…

What you need to know:

The weight loss industry is a huge business and still growing – close to $70 billion in revenue expected this year alone (compare to $500 billion we spend on groceries). But obviously something is afoul, as the average American is still getting heavier year after year.

A lifestyle change seems like a better approach, because habits are, well, habitual. We get used to doing things a certain way, and then it’s not an effort to continue doing them. For example, getting into the habit of eating whole grain products instead of refined grains. Getting into the habit of drinking only water. Getting used to less salty food over the course of several months through gradual reduction. Ditto for sugar.

We’re not saying that this is easy. If you’ve been drinking pop for 30 years, making it a habit to drink just water is a daunting task. That’s why starting young is a key success factor. If your children equate thirst with water, not juice, that’s a life lesson that will help them manage their weight ten or twenty years down the road (not to mention dentist bills).

Another issue to consider is the role that the food industry is playing in creating good or bad lifestyle choices for us. With snacks getting shoved in front of our faces every which way we turn, it’s so easy to succumb to temptation. Think Doritos and Coke when filling up the minivan, a 400 calorie latte at the bookstore, or even a “healthy” 500 calorie snack at the gym after a workout.

What to do at the supermarket:

For those of us complaining about the high price of healthy foods (fresh fruits and vegetables) here is some interesting math: 72 million Americans are on some sort of diet. They will spend $70B this year on dieting. That works out to almost $1000 per person spent on dieting, on average. Imagine using those $1000 to improve the quality and nutrition of the products you purchase – an extra $20 a week to get more nutrients into your body. And if you kick the soft drink habit, switching to tap water – that’s another $125 of savings annually.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/nurtureprinciples Rebecca Scritchfield

    Diets don’t work at all and I spend pretty much all my counseling time with clients undoing the damage diets have caused. I hope to be out of work one day :)

    I hope more and more people blog about this topic and I would love to see the popular press come out and say “enough is enough”. Check out the kind of crazy comments I have on my blog about the HCG diet.

    http://www.dietsinreview.com/diet_column/07/hcg-diet-look-elsewhere-for-weight-loss/

  • Heidi

    Wait, rebecca, that doet had 500 calories a day? Oh my! Imagine the damage that that could do to a body with lack of even essential nutrients. i would think anything less than 1000 would be horrid. plus, what would something like that do or the long run.. After the diet how do you return to eating a normal healthy diet after 500 calories a day. CRAZY!!!

  • Amanda

    Another great tip for saving at the grocery store and a great way to promote water is to buy water by the gallon at a refill station. This is becoming more and more popular in my area. For example: At Earth Fare (www.earthfare.com, in NC, SC, TN, GA, AL) you can refill your own gallon(s) jugs for .39 -.59 (depending on the location). This has been a huge saver for me on bottled water since my tap water is horrible. It also allows me to have several gallons on hand instead of just a Britta pitcher full. I am also using glass instead of plastic, so that helps prevent leaching.

  • http://www.twitter.com/arinehartdc Alexander J. Rinehart, MSACN

    Great article. I routinely see patients who have been to other health professionals who try calorie counting, points systems and all of these things that may work for the short-term but ultimately leave consumers fat, broke and frustrated. It’s hard to lose weight no matter your diet or exercise if you’re in a horrible relationship. It’s difficult to lose weight if you’re not sleeping, if you’re stressed and your cortisol is high. It’s difficult when we live in toxic environments and those toxins become stored in our fatty tissue, sow hen we finally start losing weight those toxins are released and communicate metabolically with our systems to reduce further weight loss! There are a number of macronutrient/micronutrient/chemical/physical/psychological/socioeconomic reasons for failure to lose weight. An approach needs to be multidimensional and clinicians need to be able to speak to these other factors and/or properly comanage patients more effectively.

  • Timothy Lake

    For most (not ALL) people, being overweight is a choice. You can justify your bad habits by blaming the food industry, the health industry or the diet industry. I know, I have done all 3. What you really need to do is examine your relationship with yourself — humans are not altruistic. We choose to do things that give us satisfaction. So what are you getting out of your poor food choices? Maybe that means you don’t have to deal with intimacy issues, or that overeating is pleasurable in and of itself, or that poor health gets you sympathy — you are getting something “positive” out of being obese. The road to good health (and that includes a healthy weight) means dealing with the underlying issues. Then making good choices of food and exercise will become pleasurable — and make “dieting” unnecessary.

  • http://www.feedyourroots.com Penina Bareket

    Great article! This is the essence of the work I do with my clients – supporting them as they make this lifestyle changes into lifelong habits. Thank you for sharing!

  • Philip

    There’s an interesting post over at the Health Journal Club that makes the case that people should just not eat anything that wasn’t a food 100 years ago. Gets rid of the aspartame, bleached GM flour, high fructose corn syrup garbage they try to pass off as food these days. If interested you can read on it here,

    http://healthjournalclub.blogspot.com/

  • http://sustainablegrub.wordpress.com Dee

    This is so on the mark. You can’t go wrong if you follow what Pollan says (Eat Food. not too much. Mostly plants), you choose local and organic, you eat mostly fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and reduce your intake of meat and sugar, and you learn to cook. Mark Bittman’s book Food Matters says the same thing and has sensible, simple yet elegant recipes. Follow them, eat fantastic meals, feel better, lower your carbon foot print, and lose weight. For real.

  • http://lucilleroberts.blogspot.com/ Lucille Roberts

    A good tactic to solidify a diet is to keep a journal of everything you eat and your calories in and out. After a month or two, you will start knowing what most things you eat have in them, and the habit of moderation will be ingrained into you. The hardest part is staying on track, but when the numbers are staring you in the face, it becomes easier.

  • Jen B

    I follow the “Mindful Eating” plan- i.e. eat whatever you want, REALLY, paying attention to hunger and satiety cues, and eventually your body realizes you can truly have whatever you want, and you will opt for healthier options. Worked like a charm for me. Moreover, I actually feel like I am respecting my body for the first time in a long time… instead of walking around going “Don’t eat that!” I say, “What do I feel like eating?” Sometimes it’s a cookie, and I eat it. More often it’s delicious foods with whole grains and vegetables and fruits… yum.