Fighting Temptations With Food
Making healthy dieting choices seems easy to commit to on paper, however people often make poor food choices that sabotage progress towards their goals.
We can hold the image of the body we’re trying to obtain, but bad eating habits are very difficult to break if they’ve existed for a long time .
People rarely see results from diets because they often fail to replace old patterns with new ones. Replacing old behavior patterns will help prevent cyclical weight gain and losses from reoccurring.
Without understanding these underlying behavior patterns, reliance on the newest diets fads becomes the norm for individuals trying to lose weight.
Why Staying Committed With Most Diets is So Difficult
Starting any type of diet requires meticulous planning, preparation, and commitment in order to successfully work for any period of time. Many popular diets found on the market have strict guidelines in terms of what to eat and vague restrictions on how much the food you should consume.
As a result, many dieters find themselves overeating healthy foods because of the amount of food they presumed they were eating throughout the day. In a 2012 study, when scientists controlled the amounts of soup served to a group of volunteers, the group with the perceived lower amounts of soup served self-reported hunger sooner than the group served larger quantities.
While this desire for a constant supply of food served human ancestors well for their hunter/gather lifestyles, it’s a great disadvantage to many living in a society with an abundance of food options available to them. Since humans no longer have a need to store fat for long periods of time until the next large meal is consumed, losing fat today has become a lot more challenging than we expected.
Excess calories from consumed food are stored in our fat cells, which produces an appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin. While this hormone prevents individuals from gaining too much fat, leptin is released in larger quantities with obese individuals. If too much leptin is released, the obese individual will become leptin resistant, which makes losing body fat an uphill battle from the start.
Another appetite hormone called ghrelin effects the amount of food that we consume by making us feel hungry after meals when insulin levels are their lowest. When an overweight individual goes on a weight loss diet, their body fights them by releasing less leptin and increasing ghrelin hormones in the bloodstream.
The longer you’re in a calorie deficit, your appetite will continue to increase while your meal satiety will decrease.
Importance of Photo Logging Food
In many first world societies today, the average person consumes much more food than many of the royal families did over 100 years ago. As a result, it isn’t uncommon for a person to consume quantities of food that would have been served to a family of three in one day!
This is why I regularly recommend for my personal training clients to take a meticulous log of the meals they eat throughout the day to keep track of their calories. Without a food log it becomes easy to lose account of the small meals, drinks, snacks, and sugary foods that make losing fat much difficult to lose.
It’s also beneficial for those that are dieting because they can moderate the calories they eat without giving up any of the foods they love. Dieting is a lifestyle, not a fad, because of the time that has to be committed to it to make it work.
With smartphone devices like the Apple iPhone, you can keep track of your meals using the camera feature and later record your meals on an online digital database or just a plain composition notebook (see How to Use Your Smartphone to Track Your Meals).
The Wrap Up
Staying committed to a diet sounds simple on paper, but it is more often than not a battle of human psychology. The human brain was wired to the nomadic lifestyles of our ancestors, however, the society we live in provides us with an abundance of food options on a regular basis. To prevent our habits from getting the best of us, it best for individuals to focus on quantity over quality to determine which dieting lifestyle is best for us.
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