Diets don’t work and their are so many problems with the act of dieting. Yes, when you follow a diet you can lose weight. But, once the diet is over, the weight comes back on. Often, dieting is all about the foods that you cannot have. Of course, the more you try to not think of a white bear or blue cow, the more you think of it. Dieting in fact, can be a catalyst for food addiction. In order for weight loss to be long lasting, there must be lifestyle changes. Slender For Life™ supports you in making healthy lifestyle changes that can easily last for your lifetime. If you are serious about weight loss, make hypnosis for weight loss a part of your life.
Problems with “Dieting” (Restrained Eating)
1. When we diet, we attempt to suppress thoughts of food. However, if we try not to think about something, soon that becomes our dominant thought (“White Bear” problem (blue cow)). Feeling deprived increases the rewarding value (salience) of food, which then increases our craving for that food. If we indulge, we then feel out of control and resolve to intensify our dieting efforts. The cycle repeats.
2. Dietary restraint requires that we ignore internal signals of hunger and satiety in order to adhere to a set of external rules – eating that which is “diet-approved”. This sets up an internal battle between the dieter’s physiologic drive to eat (eg. hormones and neuropeptides) and their cognitive/mental efforts to resist that drive. This internal struggle heightens their vulnerability to negative emotional states which, in turn, serves to make food even more rewarding, thus making it more difficult to adhere to the diet. Dietary restraint can easily become disinhibited (i.e., they relinquish control) in the presence of strong emotions or a perceived transgression. And if they’re a restrained eater, they’ll probably end up eating a whole lot more than someone who is trained to listen to their internal signals of hunger and satiety. This phenomenon is referred to as “counter-regulation” (or the “what the hell” effect). After losing control, the individual typically resolves to heighten dietary restraint and the cycle repeats.
3. Research suggests that an alternating pattern of food restriction and food bingeing contributes to reward dysfunction (change in neural circuitry) and an addictive pattern of eating. Moreover, intermittent access to highly preferred “binge” foods (as practiced by many restrained eaters) may progressively decrease the acceptability of less palatable, more healthy foods and promote relapse to more rewarding, less healthy alternatives.
Conclusion: Repeat dieting, high day-to-day fluctuations in intakes, and attempts to enforce highly rigid control over eating all seem to be counterproductive to weight control efforts and may disrupt more appropriate food choice behaviors.
Characteristics of “successful restrainers” include:
(1) employing more flexible, less stringent restraint, (2) avoiding “all-or-none” thinking, (3) using more general behavior modification techniques, such as limiting portions and eating slowly, and (4) accepting and dealing with transgressions.
Energy flows where attention goes. If you focus on “I can’t have chocolate,” your unconscious mind focuses on chocolate. Becoming Slender For Life and it’s hypnosis CD set can support you in ending the dieting madness and can help you create lifelong lifestyle changes that support you with weight loss. If you really want to lose weight (and keep it off), hypnosis for weight loss can make the difference for you. At Slender For Life™ you learn the characteristics of successful weight management so that you can focus on your well-being.
This post concludes this series on food addiction.
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