by Dr. Ginny Trierweiler
When it comes to healthy eating and weight loss, how “good” do you need to be?
Before I discovered the secrets to transformative eating, I felt I was generally eating pretty well.
I staunchly avoided fast food restaurants. I remember my nephew repeatedly asking me to take him to a fast food restaurant and I repeatedly told him, “I will never take you there, because I love you.”
I tried to eat vegetables. And I tried to buy organic, at least for the Dirty Dozen.
I often resisted the temptations of highly processed junk foods.
When I ate out in restaurants, I was proud at how often I resisted dessert, and sent back the bread and butter.
I felt quite virtuous doing all these things.
Still, I continued to struggle with excess weight and excess body fat, and a variety of health conditions that tend to be linked to what we eat, like chronic pain and inflammation, pre-diabetes, insomnia, and brain fog.
So I’ve been quite curious about this question for some time– how “good” do we have to be with our diet?
Of course, the answer is, it depends on the results we want!
Let’s address this from the perspective I had, and that of my clients who want to release their excess weight, get into their slender, right-sized body, and regain great health and vitality.
They want to feel very good, sleep very well, regain great energy and mental clarity.
They want to feel very comfortable in their own bodies.
For me and for my clients, this way of thinking about “being good” with our eating is a bit problematic.
For me, this way of thinking went along with the diet mentality. In other words, I would think “I was good today in eating a salad for lunch, so now I can have this dessert with dinner.”
This is a common type of cognitive bias referred to as “the halo effect.”
Why is this kind of thinking so problematic?
It’s a way of thinking that seeks a way out of eating in the most healthy, slenderful way.
It suggests we want to eat this way, only up to a point, and then we seek exceptions.
There are several problems to this “exception seeking” mindset.
- With this exception seeking, you’re looking for ways to keep the non-nutritious food-like substances in your diet, going along with the part of your brain (the lizard brain) that likes to argue that the bad foods are good foods, because they’re highly pleasurable and easy to eat.
- This kind of exception-seeking treats this way of eating more like a diet, a temporary thing. Any time we’re trying to change our habits, we don’t want to treat the new habit like a temporary thing– that makes it much less likely to be successful. You’re much better off thinking of it as “just the way I eat,” rather than as a “diet.”
- Making exceptions all the time means making decisions all the time. Research suggests that the average person makes > 200 food decisions every day. That exhausts your willpower! You will do much better to have some clear, healthy, slenderful eating rules that you follow very consistently, rather than put yourself in the position to need to make so many eating decisions.
- Finally, to the question of HOW faithfully you have to eat this way to get the results, available research suggests that you need to follow this eating plan at quite a high degree of fidelity (e.g. 94%) in order to achieve the full potential health and weight loss benefits of eating this way. Once your adherence to this eating approach drops to 88%, you may still retain some benefits from the parts you are following, but research indicates you are likely to stop releasing excess weight and fat or even tend to start gaining weight and increasing your fat storage.
And, when your body is working to keep your weight high and storing excess fat, that is an indication that your body is not doing well — that you’re experiencing chronic inflammation and dysregulated hormone functioning.
That’s not good because chronic inflammation and dysregulated hormones defeat your weight loss and they gradually cause disease and ill health, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, chronic fatigue, COPD, and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and lupus.
Bottom line, this “I’ve been good, so I’m going to have a treat” way of thinking is diet thinking and it doesn’t serve us. It leads us to eat in a way that results in excess fat storage and weight along with declining health and vitality.
Would you like to know how close YOUR eating is to Transformative Eating? Take this 5 minute quiz to find out! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/slenderquiz
I would love to hear your thoughts about this information I have shared.
Please be well. Eat some nutritious foods. Take care of your body, so it can take care of you!
Dr. Ginny
