WL&S Support

There’s an old saying, everyone knows it, ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again’. Good advice unless the task at hand happens to be going on a diet. When it comes to diets it should read, “Don’t try, don’t try again”. Now don’t get me wrong, if you’re overweight and intent on improving your health I’m not advocating giving up. What I’m saying is most fad diets will eventually do you more harm than good. Fear not, there is a solution.

The diet industry is largely about marketing. Psych you up, and give you a meal plan that drops your caloric intake by 50% or more and hope you see enough results in the first few months to keep you coming back for more.  You will lose some weight, but maintaining the diet is usually not a reality, and a year later you will find yourself back to where you were, or even heavier. And the really bad news, now you have tricked your body to the point of impairing your own metabolism.

A lot of it has to do with your RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate) or BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) and how calorie restriction affects it. Basically your RMR is the rate at which your body burns energy when you are not doing anything strenuous and accounts for a major portion of the calories you burn off each day. It is affected by a few things including your body composition – the percentage of muscle and fat that makes up your body.  A recent study from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana seems to confirm what has been suspected for a long time, that is,  when you go on a sharply calorie restricted diet your BMR is affected long after you cease the diet.

Here’s the curse, the balance of calories in and calories out is the basic equation which determines whether you gain, lose or maintain your weight. Your BMR is a critical factor in that equation and the higher it is the easier it is to control your weight. When you significantly restrict your intake for extended periods of time your BMR drops because (it is theorized) your body thinks a famine is coming and goes into starvation mode. Then when you resume eating your pre-diet portions the equation is skewed and the amount of food you ate before which allowed you to maintain your weight will now cause you to gain weight.

Now let’s say, as the term “yo-yo” suggests, that a year or two later you try it again. Cut the calories hard for a month or three, lose some weight (not as much this time) then ultimately slip back into your pre-diet routine. Your BMR will have dropped even more and your body gets even more efficient at storing fat.

So is there a solution? Well yes there is, but if you have been through the scenario above the truth is it’s not easy. In fact it may be damned hard but it can be done and is being done regularly.

Here is my prescription for weight loss success. First, get a comprehensive medical assessment that will look at your physical status. BMR is an important factor but there could be other chemical or hormonal imbalances that when treated will make a big difference. Second, get back to basics, and third, focus on the reasons ‘why’ (more on these below).

Everyone has advice or tips to offer on nutrition. It is almost guaranteed that in any social gathering someone will expound on the latest cleanse that will suck the evil right out of your cells (I truly had a lady at a spa tell me that once), or a new found herb from deep in the Amazon jungle that will cure whatever ails you. Everybody seems to have a theory on this food or that spice but how many people know the basics and follow them?

Few, if any dietitians that do private consulting will ever mention the Canada Food guide. Why? Because they know it is almost certain the client will tune them out. People don’t want to hear about the Canada Food guide because they consider it “archaic”, and “out-dated”. No, don’t tell me about that, tell me about the best foods to help my body burn away the fat, or relieve my headaches…, on and on. People want the quick fix and the magic bullet. The problem is 99 out of 100 of them don’t do the basics.

What are the basics? I asked Lisa Koski RD to enlighten me and I doubt any of this will come as a revelation but here it is; eat your fruits and vegetables, know your calorie requirements and stay within them, and ensure the carbohydrates in  your meals have a low Glycemic Index score.

That’s it. We’ve all heard that before but do you follow it? Obviously most of us don’t.

The tough question is why?

I’ve been to motivational seminars where they tried to pump me up so I could go out and make a million dollars and one of the phrases that was cast about was, “if you have enough reasons why, the how doesn’t matter’. Once again when it comes to improving your health, one part of that saying is very true; you need a strong reason ‘why’.

Knowledge is not the only answer when it comes to changing behaviour. There are enough books on food and nutrition in print to fill every Burger King in the land, and as I’ve said before everyone seems to have some ideas on nutrition – they may not be the most sound of ideas, but information on health is everywhere.

There is no question that learning more about food and nutrition is helpful but most people know they should be eating 8 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. The information does not translate into behaviour change. Change occurs when we are deeply emotionally tied to a reason we need to change. Unfortunately for most people that level of motivation does not occur until they have had a scare related to their health that threatens their mortality, but it doesn’t have to be that way. And increasingly I see people taking action before their doctor tells them they must “change or die”.

Here are my recommendations and a simple strategy that to maintain your focus on practising new behaviours. First get a better understanding of how you relate to food. You can do this by seeing a good dietitian or a counselor that will not only focus on the calories-in/calories-out information but on helping you become aware of the cues that influence your eating. There is a great program now being offered in Kelowna called, ‘Emotional Eating’ which does just that. Next write down the push/pull reasons for change. Five bad things that will happen if I don’t change (the Push), and five beneficial things that I will experience when I do change (the Pull). Write them down and put them somewhere you will see them, and read them every day.

Some of the most powerful reasons that I have heard people leverage are things like, “I want to be able to dance with my daughter at her graduation”, and “I couldn’t carry my baby up the stairs to her bedroom anymore”. You can visualize those statements, and they get you where you live. There is something very powerful, almost magical in finding the intrinsic motivation to make a major change in your life. It’s the type of magic that can remove a curse.

Author:
Marshall Melnychuk
iQuest Kelowna
250-860-3413
www.iquestkelowna.ca