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On this episode of the Daily Dollop, I'm chatting about why diets don't work, and specifically I want to talk about what work means because the definition of work is actually the most important part of the whole conversation. It's dollop time! Hey, hey, my name's Kate. I'm a registered nutritionist, and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start.
And 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 Dollop, everybody. Today, I want to talk to you about something that many of us have experienced, including me.
I've done plenty in my younger years, and that is going on a diet, trying to eat healthy, trying to get this ideal perfect today. Only to find that you can't stick to it consistently, and as a consequence, feel like you've failed. If that sounds familiar to you, you are absolutely not alone. And if you've done diet after diet and feeling pretty confused about how to eat well, then this is the episode for you.
Fun fact about me is that I have done plenty of little thumb diets over the years, many of them in my late teens and early 20s. Happy to say that by my mid to late 20s, I was starting to ditch this stuff because things with my eating were not looking so crash-hot, and I probably had what I would define today now as disordered eating behaviors and a disordered view of food. That led into, by the time I started to hit my late 20s, early 30s, started to become a whole lot better when I committed to building a healthier relationship with food and my body and health as a whole. And it's something that I really like to work with people on as well.
It's learning how to eat well without stress, one habit of time for the rest of your life. But a couple of the weird diets I've done over the years is I have bought a liver cleans diet from the chemist, did that about 20 odd years ago, and it was this crazy, crazy strict diet where you couldn't eat hardly anything except for this handful of random vegetables and stuff. And all my goodness, the headache and nausea I felt 48 hours into that diet was just beyond anything I could stand, and I absolutely could not stick to the seven days of it. It was just gross, dizzy, lightheaded.
Oh, I was just like, I could not do this. This is awful. I tried to go 100% whole foods like so literally nothing at all if it had even minutely changed between the farmer and me, like I tried to stick to this like really whole. Again, I soon found out that a lot of foods have changed somewhat mostly just a little bit between the farmer and me, and it really limited my food choices.
Again, it was ended up being pretty restrictive. It was pretty intense in the kitchen in terms of like so much food prep and cooking. And anyway, that lasted, I could think all of like two or three days or something. What else have I done?
I did a bikini body challenge in my early 20s, which was a very strict calorie diet combined with really high amounts of exercise weight training cardio. About six to eight weeks into that diet, I managed to get that far. I started getting sick, like semi-regularly, like every couple of weeks, like getting a cold. I started bruising really easily and then getting nose bleeds.
Anyway, my very new husband at the time was literally like, you need to stop doing this. And I did break the diet and the night I broke the diet, I ate like seven or eight pieces of white bread toast with butter and honey. Like I just remember my hunger just being insatiable and I binged on honey toast. I was just so hungry, but then the hunger remained for months and months later.
And it was just like I couldn't stop eating. I just felt I had been so restrictive for such a long time. Whilst also doing pretty intense exercise, my body was just like in full b mode. So that was pretty crazy.
I've done the Michelle Bridges body transformation program. I did, you know, I was pretty big on like trying to discount calories for a good portion of time. I've done it. I've done it.
I've tried it. I get it, tried the low carb. Like when I say low carb, like no carbohydrate rich foods at all. Brutal.
I got to like four or five days on that, but I was like the headaches and just so hungry. Anyway, I did not feel good at all. And so I guess I want I'm sharing this with you because I just want you to know that I do understand. I do understand the desire to go on diets.
I do understand the desire to make your body be a certain way or feel the pressure for it to be a certain way and that that then drives you to do certain things with your food to try and control that. But that it ends up backfiring on us pretty much every time. So just know that you are not alone and this episode is for you. I want to talk about this idea of it working because the title of my episode today is Why Dites Don't Work.
And before we move on, because I've got a client story to tell you is let's define what work means. Like what does work mean? If I say diets don't work, like what does that mean? And if you're online and you know this person, this diet is making a claim that's like this diet really works, often they might mean or you'll lose weight or you'll burn body fat or it'll make you body smaller or whatever it is.
They're promising. And when it comes to weight loss, most programs do work in that they create an energy deficit that if you do stick to them perfectly, right? And you also happen to genetically have the metabolic profile to lose weight in an energy deficit. The diet will work, right?
But when I say the word work, when I say diets don't work, what I mean is is it a sustainable, realistic eating plan that you can do every day without stress that contributes to your long-term, good physical and mental health. Because a lot of the problems is not that these bad diets don't work in terms of either like making a body smaller or not. It's this that they're really difficult to stick to and they're so restrictive and unsustainable and often also so restrictive they don't meet your nutrition needs. They don't actually meet my definition of work, a way of eating that's easy for you to do each day, that feels flexible and achievable and it actually promotes long-term health in your body.
Because just because a diet helps you lose weight doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to improve your health. Because weight loss doesn't automatically mean better health, healthy behaviors mean better health. So I want to give you just a quick, I guess, story from a client of mine to just help illustrate this point a little bit more. So this client was trying very hard to be healthy and manage her weight by following what is called time-restricted feeding.
That's the particular protocol that's like 16, 8, where you're fasting for 16 hours in a 24-hour period and you've only got an 8-hour window. So most people will fast breakfast and then they aim for their first meal of the day to be around midday or lunchtime. So every single day she was skipping breakfast and fasting to lunch or at least trying to. And every day she would start with really strong wheel power but by midday she was ravenous, walk past the cafe, smell the hot chips, think stuff it, I'm starving, the tuna salad I brought for lunch.
At the window I don't want to eat that BLT and chips, yes, ordered. And then after that meal, her blood sugar levels have picked up because she's eaten a nice amount of food, the guilt spiral. I'm useless, why can't I just stick to this? I'll start again tomorrow, I'll try again tomorrow.
Often that was accompanied by, well, I may as well eat all the things that I shouldn't be eating and I'll start again tomorrow. So is that a familiar tale for you? Have you ever done that before? Essentially for this particular client and for many of my clients, round and round the merry-go-round, they would go each day starting a fresh, fresh wheel power only to find that she just couldn't stick to it consistently?
Until she came to see me, because here is the truth bomb that I want you to understand, is that any kind of eating pattern that controls your food, right? Because that's what a diet does, it's goal is to control your food intake to either change your body in some way. It teaches you to ignore your body's own hunger signals. It also encourages black and white thinking, so you're either on track or you've failed and you've blown it.
It also doesn't allow for flexibility or autonomy in the context of your individual lifestyle. So, and the thing is, is that real sustainable nutrition doesn't actually work like fat diets work, because it's just about those small, consistent decisions you make every day, not about sticking to this perfectly curated dietary pattern. It's, you know, learning to tune into your hunger and work with your body rather than ignoring your hunger and fighting your body. So, one of the things that happened with this client is we, we just challenged some mindsets about this idea of fasting that she felt really wedded to, that she really wanted to do.
And I just said, well, it's clearly not working for you and sometimes when we try the same thing and expect a different result, that leads to frustration. So, why don't we try a different approach which is eating according to our hunger cues and, and, you know, working our routine around that. And she had a daily routine in terms of her work where she could do that. And turns out she doesn't feel hungry when she first wakes up, but she feels hungry around 10.30am.
So, we had our first meal a day then, three to four hours later, she's hungry again. So, we had another meal, we, again, three to three to four hours later, another meal, and then dinner. And so, she found that her cadence in terms of hunger and eating was around three to four hours, which meant that she had around four eating occasions across the day, and that really worked for her. The other things we worked on was building meals that she actually enjoyed, and she hated tuna salad.
So, I was like, why are we planning this for lunch if you hate eating this? And that's actually learn how to make healthy meals that you really like eating. We really focused a lot on honoring hunger of how do we tune in and listen to our body, and then what do we do with that information when we start to sense it. We learned about building snacks and how we build a snack that's satisfying, so she wasn't starving by dinner time.
We learned about the role of fiber and protein. There were so many things we unpacked meal planning, et cetera, and we worked over those one at a time. But essentially the goal was she stopped seeing food as the enemy and started feeling good both physically and mentally when she was working with her body rather than against it. So, you don't actually need more willpower.
You just need a better strategy. The truth is, when you nourish your body consistently and realistically, it's so much easier to eat well, and you don't need the restriction. So, if this resonates with you, let's chat. You can book a free 30-minute strategy session with me or my colleague, Stephanie Lechas, over at alahhealth.com.au And we'll just talk about where you're at, what you're looking to achieve with your nutrition, and what small steps you can take to start feeling better without doing another diet.
Well, that's it for today's episode, and we'll catch you next time. The Daily Dollar Podcast 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 that last.
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 alahhealth.com.au Or you can send us a message on Instagram. Until next time.