Extreme Diets and Eating Behavior
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admin 12 October, 2008
Because extreme diets are so difficult to follow, they require maintaining a very high level of dietary restraint. In a study that looked specifically at dietary restraint, researchers found that high levels of dietary restraint and rigid control of eating were associated with higher scores of disinhibition and more frequent, severe episodes of overeating. Dietary restriction for fast weight loss can create a rebound effect and lead to a total loss of control over eating.
Here’s an example of how this works. Let’s say you decide to stop eating your usual breakfast as a way to lose weight quickly. Cutting out a meal a day does save a lot of calories. Numerous studies, though, have shown that skipping meals is neither healthy nor an effective weight-loss method. Breakfast supplies important nutrients, so skipping this meal robs the body of the nutrients it needs for the morning and the rest of the day. Not surprisingly, the body often rebels with extreme hunger later in the morning. By lunchtime, excess hunger leads to overeating. Or, worse yet, the morning’s hunger gets satisfied with a midmorning pastry. The body is still trying to make up the lost calories at dinnertime, and overeating continues.
Extreme weight-loss methods are difficult if not impossible to sustain for a long enough period of time to lose a significant amount of weight because they do not mesh with the realities of most people’s lives. When people go back to their regular routines, all of their underlying issues related to weight management come back and create the same combustible mix that caused weight gain in the first place. It is far better to adopt a strategy of multiple steps that can be incorporated into the routines of daily life rather than choose a course of dramatic sacrifice and restriction that is likely to lead to rebound.
The opposite is also true. Flexible control—adjusting eating from meal to meal—is associated with a greater chance of losing weight successfully. Learning to regulate eating in a flexible way in sync with daily life probably helps explain why the establishment of a normal diet is a success factor for long-term weight loss.
Participants in the Weight Watchers LTM Database and the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR) report that they pay ongoing attention to what they eat and are conscious of their eating patterns without turning their lives upside down. They have found the balance among sensible eating, structure, and flexibility, with just enough structure to create consistency and enough flexibility to allow for choices from a wide variety of foods and in all kinds of social situations. Making conscious choices and being aware of what you are eating is the foundation for making wise food choices long term.
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