What is dietary thinking and how it makes you gain extra pounds

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

You may be dieting all the time, even though you’re sure you’re not.

If people want to lose weight, the first thing that comes to their mind is to limit themselves in food, and quite harshly. That is, go on one of the many diets: low-calorie, carbohydrate-free, or any other. Paradoxically, diets lead to weight gain, but this is not their only danger.

The most annoying thing is that they never end. Because of them, a person's dietary thinking is formed, which can precede eating disorders and generally interfere with the enjoyment of life.

How to recognize dietary thinking

This is a set of attitudes and habits, due to which a person seems to be on a diet for life. Even if he is sure that he lives and eats as usual, he still perceives food as an enemy and cannot stop controlling and limiting his food.

Nutritionists, nutritionists, and psychologists who work with eating disorders sometimes refer to this mindset as the hidden diet. Here are its signs:

• You are counting calories. As well as carbohydrates and fats. Before you eat something, mentally estimate the nutritional value of the food and determine if it is too large. Moreover, you are not always aware of this.
• You avoid "bad" foods. Anything can fall into this category, from fries to cottage cheese with 5 percent fat instead of zero.
• You are punishing yourself for "bad" food. Fasting after eating a piece of cake. Jump rope to quickly "burn" a portion of salad with mayonnaise. You figure out how you will have to pay for this or that dish.
• You only eat at certain times. For example, you go hungry after six in the evening. Or take longer intervals between meals, even if you really want to eat.
• You eat less before big events. Weddings, birthdays, corporate events - all this becomes a reason to cut back on the usual diet.
• You are limiting your intake of fats and carbohydrates. And believe in dietary myths that say you should eat less.
• You are trying to suppress hunger with drinks. Instead of eating right away, drink water, tea or coffee.
• You take a long time to choose what to eat. Moreover, you are guided not by your tastes and desires, but by what food is the safest.
• You try not to eat in public. Especially "wrong" foods like desserts or fast food. You are ashamed and do not want someone to think you are a glutton. Therefore, you eat all the "forbidden" foods on the sly, alone.
• You only care about numbers. Weight, waist, belly fat, body mass index. You focus only on them, and not on your well-being.

How dietary thinking is formed

We are surrounded by myths and stereotypes about food and nutrition. Here and the division of food into good and bad, and stories about how harmful carbohydrates and fats, and the idea that your diet needs to be tightly controlled.

If you are a woman, sexist ideas are also added here: a woman should be a fragile fairy who feeds exclusively on lettuce and pollen. Not without fat-phobic stereotypes: only a thin body can be beautiful, and if a person does not follow an eternal diet, he is lazy and weak-willed.

We absorb these ideas from childhood. They take root in our minds, make us feel guilty for every bite we eat, and impose severe restrictions on ourselves.

At first, this translates into an "open" diet. A person begins to lose weight vigorously: he starves, exhausts himself with sports, weighs each portion, meticulously reads the composition on food labels. Moreover, this behavior is perceived as correct, natural and approved. And as a result, it becomes a way of life.

Sometimes this happens completely unconsciously: a person is sure that he is not on any diet, but nevertheless he counts the calories in the food eaten and goes to bed hungry.

Why Diet Thinking Is Dangerous

1. It Leads to Eating Disorders

The "hidden" diet is still a diet. Therefore, a person who practices this has to deal with all its side effects. Including eating disorders: anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder.

2. It leads to weight gain

There are two factors at play here. First, due to the fact that a person eats less than he needs, the metabolism slows down. And secondly, after a period of restrictions "losing weight" sooner or later breaks down and begins to overeat.

3. It poisons life

It interferes with enjoying delicious food, makes you constantly feel guilty, counting calories, punishing yourself with hunger strikes and kilometers wound on a treadmill.

4. It supports the dietary culture

Constant restrictions are perceived as something normal, people "pick up" this behavior and, in fact, go on diets, even if their body mass index is quite within the normal range. And they do it from an early age: up to 66% of adolescent girls and 31% of boys have tried dieting at least once. This experience takes hold and can become a way of life.

How to Stop Hidden Diet

As an alternative to diets, psychologists and nutritionists offer informed, or intuitive, nutrition. Its essence is to listen to your body and choose food based on your own feelings and needs.

Here are some basic principles of intuitive eating.

1. Do not divide food into good and bad

It’s just that you need some products and don’t. If you are hungry and feel that of all the options you really want to eat a hamburger or a piece of cake, there is no point in denying yourself. Eat with pleasure. Once you stop scolding yourself for "improper" nutrition and demonizing food, it will no longer be a forbidden fruit. You will begin to treat food more calmly, you will have no reason to overeat, throwing "illegal" chocolates, chips or buns into yourself.

2. Don't starve

If you feel that you are hungry, and you understand that this is precisely physical hunger, and not emotional, do not tolerate it. Be sure to eat. Severe hunger ultimately leads to overeating and prevents you from "hearing" your body. You no longer understand what you really want and what you don’t, and you simply sweep away everything that is not nailed down.

To distinguish physical hunger from emotional hunger, remember when you last ate and what it was. If more than 2 hours have passed since the last meal, or it was not satisfying and varied enough, most likely you are really hungry and it's time to eat.

3. Provide yourself with a variety of foods

Try to always have as many different products as possible at home: cereals, vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry, fish, milk. To understand what you need right now, you must have at least a minimal choice. Quite often, people go hungry, and then they break loose and go hungry again, because they did not buy food in advance, and somehow I don’t want to eat the remaining pasta with dried cheese.

For the same reason, you need to strive to ensure that you always have at least one ready-made dish in stock.

4. Learn to identify when you are full

Due to the endless diets, restrictions and subsequent "overload", many no longer understand when they are hungry and when they are full. They do not feel the point after which overeating begins, do not trust themselves, try to control the portion size and end up making it even worse.

Experts on intuitive nutrition advise you to eat slowly and thoughtfully, listen to yourself and track the moment when you are already full. And also try, in principle, not to eat without a feeling of hunger: even for the company, even if there are only a couple of spoons left in the plate and it’s a pity to throw it away.

5. Take good care of your emotions

Sometimes we eat not because we are hungry, but because we are anxious, happy, or sad. The problem is that few people know how to sensibly and environmentally live emotions without breaking into addiction and other destructive behavior.

You need to try to establish contact with your feelings, learn to distinguish between them and find a way out for them.

If you're having trouble getting out of a hidden diet on your own, it is best to see a psychologist who specializes in eating disorders.