Mindful awareness techniques can be used to reshape eating habits and quell cravings.
Here’s a New Year’s resolution you can keep: Stop dieting and start savoring your food instead.
That may seem like surprising advice, but there’s mounting scientific evidence to suggest that diets don’t work. Research shows that food restriction just makes you want to eat more. And over the long term, dieting can backfire, triggering your body’s survival defenses, slowing your metabolism, and making it even harder to lose weight in the future.
A resolution to quit dieting doesn’t mean giving up on having a healthier body. Bt to successfully conquer a dieting habit, you’ll need to let go of old ideas about counting calories, banning your favorite foods, and measuring success by a number on a scale.
What’s the alternative? Many weight researchers are encouraging a new approach to healthy eating based on brain science. A variety of techniques that encourage mindful awareness of how we eat, acceptance related to the foods we want to eat, and intuitive eating exercises can be used to quell cravings and reshape your eating habits.
“The paradigms around willpower don’t work,” said Dr. Judson Brewer, an associate professor in behavioral and social sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health who has studied mindful eating practices. “You have to start by knowing how your mind works.”
The Case Against Restrictive Diets
Kicking dieting habits this time of year is especially hard because of the allure of gimmicky weight-loss plans. Many diet programs and dieting apps try to attract users with the promise that they’re not promoting a traditional diet, only to impose restrictive eating practices once you sign up.
Traci Mann, who heads the health and eating laboratory at the University of Minnesota, notes that beyond the disappointment of not keeping weight off, dieting also affects your body in a number of negative ways. Among other things, restrictive eating can affect memory and executive function, lead to obsessive food thoughts and trigger a surge in cortisol, a stress hormone.
“A diet is an unpleasant and short-lived way to try to lose weight,” said Dr. Mann, author of “Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again.”
“You might take it off in the short term, but it comes back,” Dr. Mann added.
If you’re still tempted to try that fad diet, consider this: Evidence suggests that restrictive dieting and rapid weight loss can lead to lasting changes that may slow your metabolism, alter hormones that regulate hunger, and hamper efforts to maintain your weight. A weight-reduced body responds differently to food and exercise than a body that has not dieted, studies suggest, and a dieter’s muscles may burn fewer calories than expected during exercise. These changes help explain why many chronic dieters may be eating far fewer calories than those around them, but still aren’t losing weight, said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, a professor of medicine at Columbia University’s Institute of Human Nutrition.
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