I’ve mentioned before how many “diets” I’ve done in my life (if you’re new here, suffice it to say, it’s all of them).  And for most of them, I can remember when I first heard about them and feeling as though I’d finally found “the answer”. I remember that rush of excitement and motivation and going and stocking up on what I would need and planning my meals out because THIS TIME it was going to be different.

But as time went on I’d find out that each of those miracle solutions had its own set of difficulties, and wasn’t actually a miracle at all.  Every time I failed to stick with it or what I was doing didn’t work I’d be left feeling dumb and frustrated.

In my very first post on this site I said: “any diet that restricts your intake of calories and encourages you to move more will get you results if you follow it precisely.” So essentially, if all you care about is weight loss then any of them will do the job…but the problem with the vast majority is that ALL they take into account is weight loss and they just aren’t sustainable for most people in the long run.

As a general rule, I won’t hate on any program, there’s a place for a lot of them even if they aren’t feasible for me…I don’t dismiss low-carb or keto because for some people they may work and could get the momentum rolling. But I caution most people against it, not because I now know carbs are not the evil thing they’ve been made out to be (I know I can’t convince people of that if they don’t want to hear it) but mostly just because maintaining a diet that completely eliminates a food group is not possible for most people…aka they are setting themselves up to fail.

Short of diets that starve you or have you take fat burners or supplements that wreak havoc on your nervous system – I wouldn’t say any “diet” is inherently “bad”.  BUT, and it’s a big BUT, I guarantee almost none of them are everything you think they are either…and that for every single piece of data that you can find to support why THAT is the optimum way of eating, you could also find an equal amount of evidence that it isn’t.

You’re always going to be able to find people who got great results with no apparent downsides.  But you have to consider how they are similar to you, AND how they differ.

As someone who has had both a binge eating disorder and a problem with over-restricting food, a juice cleanse leaves me vulnerable to a binge or becoming fixated on limiting calories.  Some people swear by them, but for me, it’s a recipe for disaster.  I didn’t think about that when I first heard about juicing though, it was just the next solution that I firmly believed was the answer for me.

As a lover of any form of potato, bread and fruit, I shake my head now that I ever thought keto or low carb was a great idea for me. But I absolutely convinced myself that there was enough foods that I could eat endlessly that would make up for it.

Diets that just look at calories or points may be fine for a lot of people BUT as someone who struggles with moderation I tend more towards the – well if less food equals more weight loss, then even less food equals even better results….which of course then also equals an inevitable binge.

High protein is great, but every time I did it before I’ve ended up with an increase in problems with cysts and fibroids and bad skin – because my sources of protein didn’t work for me.  I do better with minimal animal meats and dairy.

Every single time I’ve had one of these diets fail I felt either like there was a problem with my willpower (which I now know is overrated) OR like I SHOULD have realized what the problems with those diets would be for me, but there are three really obvious problems with that.  When something is new and exciting:

      1. We don’t want to see the red flags (just like in new relationships)
      2. We tend to only seek out information that will confirm what we want to hear
      3. We don’t know yet what questions to ask. 

Most of us don’t learn a lot about nutrition without seeking it out.  What I learned in school was based on the Canada Food Guide at the time which I never heard anyone contest until I was much older…and now people talk about that version of the food guide as though we always thought it was terrible and everyone ought to know that.  That isn’t the case for most of us though and we’ve just learned more since then.

Canada’s Food Guide 1992

There are a lot of things that I’ve learned on this journey that it’s hard to reconcile ever not knowing.  To me it seems terribly obvious now that whole foods are better than processed…but I definitely didn’t believe that until maybe five years ago.  I would have sworn to you that you absolutely needed dairy to be healthy…but now I can’t think of any reason why that made sense to me (not demonizing dairy, just also not feeding into the myth that we NEED it).  I would have argued at one point that burning calories through exercise is an efficient way to create a calorie deficit (when it really isn’t).

Part of me, of course, looks back on all this trial and error that I’ve done and feels a bit of a pang about all the lost time.  But without formal education in nutrition and exercise physiology, why should I have expected to know any of this?  I don’t expect to know how to do advanced calculus (or like, basic calculus tbh), so if someone who claimed to have education in calculus, or to have taught themselves successfully, came to me and told me they have a foolproof method of learning calculus more easily why wouldn’t I believe them?  They’re the ‘expert’.

This is the same with the diet and fitness industry.  Everyone with a cell phone and an internet connection can post whatever nonsense they want about how to eat and exercise.  They can steal before and after pictures from all over the internet and make all kinds of claims and a lot of this stuff seems really legitimate and believable.  So until I tried it for myself, how would I know it wasn’t legitimate or what worked for them doesn’t work for me?  Or that the restrictive nature of diets would so severely mess with my mental health and tendency towards perfectionism?  Or that it honestly isn’t even as complicated as we make it and that this search for a magic bullet actually makes navigating our relationship with food much harder than it ever needed to be.

It’s sort of like the kid in school who never wants to study or go to class so they weave a web of complicated lies to cheat on tests and assignments and get out of class…maybe it works, but the energy they expend on it ends up almost being equal to what they would have had to expend to just study and show up.

Our efforts to bypass the simple facts that we should be eating real food in quantities that don’t exceed what we need for our day-to-day activities and that we need to move our bodies and strength train to keep our muscles and bones healthy far surpass the amount of effort it would take to just embrace them…we can’t see that in the moment though. 

Because hindsight is 20/20.  So stop focusing on what you think you SHOULD have known before you had the information you have now.  It isn’t about when you knew better, it’s about what you do once you know.