When diets tell you that “diets don’t work”
There’s this interesting trend going on right now in the diet industry, and it’s something I think we should be looking out for:
Diets telling you that “diets don’t work.”
Yes, they’ll give themselves a different name and tell you how they’re different from everything else out there… but as thoughtful consumers of information, products, and services, we ought to examine these claims a bit more closely.
I recently got served an ad for a “non”-diet that literally started with the three words: “Diets don’t work.” And that statement coming from what seemed to me like a diet itself made me want to dig deeper into the program to see what it was really about.
Here’s what I found out about how it works: there are two days a week where you follow a meal plan of theirs, and then the rest of the days you can technically eat whatever you’d like. I dug deeper and found a sample of one of these ‘meal plan’ days - provided by the company itself, so it’s legit - and did the calculations. It was about 920 calories - less than the daily caloric need of an average toddler.
So, tell me:
How is eating less than 1000 calories in a day not a diet?
How is following their plan 2 days a week, and then eating whatever you want the other 5, not a cycle of restricting and binging?
How does this kind of program create the kind of sustainable habit change it promotes?
As a general rule of thumb: anything super restrictive or cookie cutter in its approach is probably a diet, and you should probably be skeptical of a diet telling you that diets don’t work.
At fuelED, when we say lifestyle change, we actually mean it.
Depending on your goals, if they include weight loss or fat loss, then yes - our plan for you may include eating fewer calories. But we also know that healthy, sustainable habit change means eating ENOUGH food. It means learning to understand and honor hunger cues. It means gaining control around your favorite foods, so that you can include them. And it means finding and developing skills and habits that you can stick to, even after your time with a coach comes to an end.
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