New Year, New You? What to focus on instead of weight loss
Weight loss hysteria seems to peak post-Christmas, when people are more desperate to lose any weight gained over the holidays. But once the excitement of new year’s resolutions has died down, many of my clients tell me that their dieting is no longer working. By February the deprivation, hunger, fatigue and/or weird digestive symptoms become unbearable. Any weight lost starts to creep back on, often with interest.
This may sound familiar, or you may be one of the 5-15% of people for whom weight loss diets work permanently. But this high failure rate is exactly why many nutritionists and dietitians no longer promote weight loss. This can be challenging in a culture that revolves around fad diets and photo editing apps, but here are some reasons why a weight loss focus often backfires, and some ideas on what to do instead.
1. Focus on weight loss doesn’t address the root cause.
Whilst we’ve been convinced that a restrictive diet or shutting down our appetite cues with medication to lose weight will address all our health problems. In most cases, weight itself isn’t the root cause. Weight gain may be correlated with some illnesses, but rather than promote starvation and malnutrition it makes more sense to me to promote nourishing food choices and enjoyable physical activity levels for long-term health.
2. It’s difficult to sustain long term. Your reptilian brain does not care if your body conforms to modern beauty standards or not - it just wants you to survive. And if it detects calorie restriction, this sets off neurohormonal cascades that tell your body to reduce its metabolic rate, ramp up hunger signals, and hold onto fat to survive the perceived “famine”. Whether the weight loss comes about from a juice cleanse or GLP-1 agonist medications, your body interprets it as starvation. Every time we restrict food, we make our bodies more efficient at storing energy, more insulin resistant, and less able to maintain muscle mass. And this leads to weight cycling…
3. Weight cycling brought on by years of yoyo or crash dieting is unhealthy.
Research shows that putting on weight, losing weight (putting on more, losing a little), over and over again, is more detrimental to our physical, mental, and emotional health than just maintaining an “above average” weight.
4. Weight isn’t an accurate indicator of health. If someone eats a lot of processed food often and never exercises, their BMI tends to be higher - but not always. Rather than focus on weight, much clearer indicators of our health that are actually within our control are our behaviours such as the foods we choose to eat, how much we exercise, and how we support our mental health.
5. It harms our mental health. The low blood sugar induced by dieting increases sympathetic nervous dominance, and stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol flood the brain placing us well and truly into stress mode. Prolonged semi-starvation has been shown to increase depression, emotional distress, anxiety, and low libido.
What to do instead
If our intention is improved health, the spotlight needs to refocus on overall wellbeing (including our relationship with food and our bodies), not weight. A goal of improving health behaviours like adding more nourishing foods and finding exercise we enjoy is realistic and respectful to ourselves and our bodies. These behaviours are likely to improve markers like cholesterol, insulin sensitivity and hormonal regulation regardless of how much (if any) weight is lost.
With acknowledgement of our individual financial capacity and other social and functional limits, goals such as eating more fruits and vegetables, getting enough fibre and movement are behaviours we have some power to control. Perhaps weight loss will follow, or perhaps it won’t - but either way, we will be healthier in both body and mind.
Casey Conroy, BVSc(Hons), BHSc(Nat), MNutrDiet, APD, CEDC
Accredited Practising Dietitian | Naturopath | Nutritionist | Herbalist | Yoga Teacher
www.funkyforest.com.au | 0432 618 279 | @funky.forest.health