Why diets may not work

There are several psychological causes that hinder compliance with diets.

When it comes to losing weightmany people rely on dieting as just another component of the small daily rituals to get the body they want. of the little daily rituals that need to be followed to get the body they want.. At a certain point, some of these people will decide to stop pretending that they are meeting the goals of their weekly food chart and return to an honest embrace of a life devoted to carbohydrates and junk food.

Others, however, will manage to stick to the diet only to discover, months later, that not only has it not worked for them, but they have actually gained weight. Why does this happen? Traci Mannof the University of Minnesota, explains part of this mystery in her book Secrets from the Eating Lab: the science of weight loss, the myth of willpower, and why you should never diet again.

It's not all about keeping tables

The title of the book may seem very blunt, but the truth is that Mann is not suggesting that it doesn't matter what you eat. Obviously is not the same as eating a diet based on industrial pastries and pizzas than sticking to an eating plan in which legumes, nuts and fruit make up 80% of what we eat.and fruit make up 80% of what is eaten. What the psychologist actually suggests is that diets are ineffective on their own, because they do not include psychological strategies for weight loss: they only indicate the raw material to be used.

Actually, this doesn't sound far-fetched. If we think of diets as if they were some sort of product to buy and apply directly, we are probably doing the latter wrong, by conferring on the diet the power to make us lose weight and ignoring everything else. Specifically, we will be ignoring the mechanisms of self-control that we should be using and whose absence can make us blind to the continuous failures to follow good food planning.

Traci Mann says that to understand why diets are ineffective we must first recognize that each person has a different way of assimilating food, and that this is largely determined by our genetics.

Many people tend to build up large layers of fat, and with others the opposite is true.. 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 or her body feels unbalanced and struggles 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 on our toes and looking for new sources of calories, which encourages, as you might expect, more trips to the fridge.

Diets take our usual eating habits and subject them to subtraction, but do not consider the compensatory exercise our body does to counteract with small daily additions such as snacking between meals. In the end it is possible that with the diet we are eating both the foods that this meal plan proposes to us and the occasional snacks that stress generates and that we are able to overlook or underestimate, without realizing that we only eat so much between meals since we started to self-impose a certain type of daily menu.

It is useless to think about willpower

Another of the book's ideas is that it is impractical to make one of the fundamental elements in dietary compliance 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" becomes irrelevant when we realize that no component of our body is capable of giving orders unilaterally, without receiving pressure from the rest of the organism. In particular, Mann believes that this concept exists only to have something to blame when something doesn't work. It is something like the hole under the carpet in which we hide what we don't want to explain.

What to do?

A useful theoretical model to explain our relationship with dieting is one that does not rely on such an abstract idea as willpower and accepts that we have to limits to the pretension of losing weight if we do not want to lose health.because of the role played by our genes. Thus, 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 is eaten, but rather to focus on following strategies to avoid falling into an unacceptably high carbohydrate temptation. These strategies can rely almost nothing on willpower, as it will bend in favor of adaptive mechanisms dictated by genetics.

What Mann proposes is to pursue goals that indirectly steer us away from tempting caloric intakes.

Some of these strategies are purely psychologicalsuch as replacing thoughts of cake with thoughts of whole-grain 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 putting obstacles in the way of accessing this food. In this way, the desire for carbohydrate food will be overtaken by another tendency that is also very human: the laziness of going to look for food. It's all benefits!

Bibliographic references:

• Mann, T. (2015). Secrets from the Eating Lab: the science of weight loss, the myth of willpower, and why you should never diet again. New York: HarperWave.