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It's free. On this episode of The Daily Doll, we're chatting about weight management news. When the majority of the nutrition information on the internet is all about weight loss, it's really difficult to know what's the truth and what's just marketing to make you buy into a product for a program. Let's unpack this today.
It's dollop time. Hey, hey, my name is Kate. I'm a registered nutritionist and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, we have tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. So, I'm changing the conversation.
You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health. Every weekday will dollop an episode into your feed covering everything from busting nutrition myths, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics and habits for a healthy life. My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free, and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy, everyday advice.
Let's do this. Welcome back to The Daily Doll Podcast, everyone. Today we are following our series of Weight Management myths and we have myth number two, which is that you must stick to the food rules. If you didn't catch yesterday's episode, we talked about myth number one, which is calories don't count.
You might not have about that myth than I highly recommend you check out yesterday's episode. But into myth two, you must stick to the food rules. This is one of my favorite things to talk about. So what do I mean when I say food rules?
Well, these are essentially made-up things, particularly, and they're made up by Instagram people. They're made up by the creators of different fights over the years. They're made up by experts pushing a particular agenda. And essentially, the purpose of the rule is to help you create this energy deficit to help you lose weight.
So examples of food rules that are really common, and you will probably be familiar with both of them, is no cars after 4pm. You can't eat red twice in a day. Heck, you can't even eat red at all. You must quit sugar.
You must fast in the morning. Second is bad for you. Don't eat late at night. Don't pay a fax with carbs.
And the list continues. I've heard all sorts of different rules over the years. And the truth is there is no scientific evidence to back out any of these rules, because one, they're so crazy specific. It would be so difficult to conduct the research required, actually make some conclusive statements about them.
And two, like, they neglect so much of our social and cultural element of food. And yeah, three, they just don't give you this ability to have flexibility in the way that you eat. So let's talk about food rules, because essentially they are made up structures that help you create an energy deficit. And food rules often originate from the diet that was created to help the follow-up lose weight.
So for example, I many years ago worked for a person trained in lots of meal plans, and she had rules, a bunch of different rules with her diets that she used to promote. They were not eating carbs at night time, like you didn't eat carbs at dinner, and they were you shouldn't pay a fax with carbs. And that made me really sad because one, I eat carbs at dinner. Every single night I have a most of my life and nothing bad because it happened to me, actually.
It's been totally fine. And secondly, pairing of carbs is one of the greatest food pairings of all time, like crackers and dip crusty sourdough bread dipped in extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, like butter on bread. Guys, that's a car stick though. It's like one of the greatest pleasures of eating.
Anyway, so these rules are there though, because if you stick to those rules, they help you create the deficit. So another example is in intermittent fasting where they're like for two days out of the five days, you're not allowed to eat more than 500 calories a day. Right? That's a rule.
So you stick to those rules. And if you do that, and then you don't over eat crazy on your non-fasting days overall, you'll have an energy deficit that will help you lose weight. In the time restricted feeding protocols where people are fasting until lunchtime, you know they've got an eight hour window to eat from say lunchtime to APM, not eating again until lunchtime and day. That's a rule.
You're only allowed to eat between these two times. Right? And because we've shortened the eating window, we've made it more difficult for you to over eat. We've made it easier for you to create an energy deficit.
Same with rules like, you know, cutting out bread rice pasta, right? If you don't eat those things or you cut out sugar like no ultra processed foods, you know, from the clean eating perspective, only eat whole foods or nothing in a packet. You automatically eliminate lots of different things you can eat thereby making it harder for you to consume more energy than anybody needs to help you create to be deficit. What I have found over the years with working with people, particularly those who have done lots of different diets over the years, fasting, keto, shake diets, is that they have all of these different rules from all of these different diets jumbled up in their head.
So they feel like they have good nutrition information. And I don't want to criticize that at all because I completely understand. And so they're like, no, I know about nutrition cake. I know what healthy eating is because they think these rules are healthy.
But the problem is that a lot of these programs have contradicting rules. And depending on what program you're doing, some of the rules will be in conflict with each other and that then leads to confusion because then you're like, well, do I eat carbs or do I know eat carbs? And like is the carbon sweet potato or a carbon bread not okay? And you start to get really confused about what is actually healthy after all.
And when these rules become jumbled in your head and you're super super confused, that can lead to what we call analysis paralysis, which can just make it really difficult for you to take any action. And then you just get stuck in your poor eating habits and et cetera. And a really quick example of this is I remember working with a client who had done lots of bad diets trying to lose weight years and years of her life. And she was telling me that she went to go eat breakfast and she thought I'm going to have a sachet of Uncle Toby's quick vanilla flavored oats because she likes those.
But then she thought and she's trying to be healthy. Well, they got out of sugar in them and sugar is bad. That's a rule that she had in her head. So then she was like, well, I probably should have rolled like proper rolled oats.
But then she was like, but they take too long to cook and I don't really like the flavor and it's all a little bit too hard and so then she just ate chocolate for breakfast. And I've told this over a few times and sometimes the audience laughs when I say that. But it's not funny. I mean, it is.
But it's actually not because what this person was going through was so much in a turmoil and stress with eating from there being this crazy concoction of rules in their head. And so this is why rules are really unhelpful and why more guidelines and principles are better. They give you more balance and flexibility and they help you navigate through what is actually a complex, nuanced, requiring context, food supply. Food nutrition and eating is not simple.
But not to the point where we're actually over simplifying things and then leaving ourselves stuck with just a bunch of rules. Most of the rules are not required for weight management or good health and often result in inflexible mindsets. And so, you know, even if weight loss is something that you're wanting or you wanting to manage your weight long term, the rules are not going to serve you to do that. So let's talk about a food rule.
It's one of my favorites, which is you must cut out bread. And I hear this one a lot. GPSA just cut out bread. Person trainer say it just cut out bread.
If you go to see a naturopath that will be like, just cut out gluten, dairy. Imagine every client I've seen in naturopath. They're like, yeah, it's not natural. They're not going to cut out gluten and dairy.
And I'm beginning to wonder if naturopath has any other kind of advice that you could cause that's all I've heard over the years. And so rather than let's talk about this rule, there's actually no scientific evidence that all the bread leads to poor, leads to weight gain or poor. There's no evidence that they're eating bread stops you from losing weight. So I actually have no idea where this came from.
But if we think back to say maybe dietary protocols that require lower carbs, bread being higher source of carbohydrate, there's probably a food that people were told not to eat and they lost weight on that diet. And then when they stopped the diet and started eating bread again, often when we stopped diets, we go back to all habits or we've been so hungry or restricted. We over eat for a period of time, we add back in all the foods that we had to cut out and we put weight back on again. And what that kind of does is it almost reinforces the belief that all the foods that we had to cut out for the diet were bad after all, because now that I'm eating them all again, I'm putting weight on.
But it's actually not those individual foods that's causing that. It's actually the fact that you're no longer now following restricted food rules and you're possibly due to that restriction now over eating just in general. So I want to really challenge you in this episode to think about what are the food rules that you have in your head that you try to stick to that you then break. One of the things that happens with food rules is they decrease what we call our autonomy.
Now autonomy is a concept where we give ourselves the ability or the environment gives us the ability to make our own decisions about what it is that we want to do in our lives day to day out our meal to meal. If we have a rule about what we can and cannot eat, that actually takes away our autonomy because it's not us deciding what we will and we'll not eat at each eating occasion. It's the rule that's deciding for us. And humans actually don't really like rules.
We like autonomy. And so depending on your own mental state is at some point or another you will break the rule out of rebellion for this desire for autonomy and eat all the things that you shouldn't be eating with the whole thing. But then because you rebel against the rule, you'll then feel bad and guilty and terrible about it and you need to listen to my food guilt episode from last week. And that will then reinforce you that you can't be trusted that you're a terrible person and that you need the rules to keep yourself on track and we just go through this cycle that continues indefinitely until we decide to do something to me.
Well, that's it for today's episode on food rules. Today we're going to do number three that you have to pass to turn into it. The daily goal of work asked is proudly brought to you by ALA Health, Build Food Confidence and learn how to choose foods that are right for you and your body. Download the app today and build habits of that last week.
As always, you can find out more about our chat in the show notes. You can also join the conversation over in the ALA Health Community Group on Facebook. We'd love to see you there. If you've got a topic you'd love to hear us chat about on the daily dollar, please let us know.
Email us at hello at alahealth.com.au or you can send us a message on Instagram. Until next time.