Change relationship with food and your body for good
If you want 2021 to be the finally year you and feel great, the first step is to go easy on yourself, says Dor Rangan Chatterjee
IF YOU’RE someone who struggles to maintain a healthy weight, don’t beat yourself up about it. If diets never seem to work in the long run, it could be because it’s harder for you to lose weight.
If you’re constantly struggling with excess pounds, it’s because you’re different. You have a different body, which is functioning in a different way and has been on a different life journey to all those people who seem to be able to maintain a healthy weight so effortlessly. It’s not your fault.
So it’s time to stop blaming yourself for all the struggles you might have had in the past about your weight.
Instead, please know this – you’re worth looking after. You’re worth feeling good about. You have a life that’s worth protecting and extending. But I promise it is possible to understand and achieve your goals in a healthy, realistic way.
Why diets don’t work
The Western world has seen soaring levels of obesity since the 80s. But the idea that previous generations were fundamentally different from us, that they had greater willpower, is crazy.
There wasn’t a sudden change in the 80s that turned our mindsets fat. What changed was the world around us. No society in the whole of history has been surrounded by as many delicious and tempting calorie-rich foods as we are. No society has been expected to do work that requires such little physical activity.
We’re more tired than ever, more stressed than ever and more likely to eat outside traditional mealtimes. All these factors play a role in weight gain.
Conventional diets generally don’t work because they put people on a regime of hunger and willpower that’s not sustainable. They also fail because they usually tackle only one or two areas – what you’re eating and how you’re moving – rather than treating the whole life and whole person.
Your brain has a setting we’re going to call its “weight point”. This is the level it considers to be your ideal weight. If you lose fat and go below your weight point (by following a calorie-restrictive diet, for example), your body will make lots of adjustments to its signalling system that trigger you to eat more food and store more of what you eat as fat.
If you gain fat and go too far above your weight point, it’ll decide you’re carrying too much and make adjustments that trigger you to eat less food and store less of it as fat. If you’re carrying excess weight, there’s a very good chance that your brain’s “ideal weight” is set too high – often due to years of yo-yo dieting. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to lose fat and keep it off until this setting is adjusted downwards.
My methods teach you how to fix your signals and dial down your weight point, so you become slimmer without suffering from hunger and fatigue.
First we need to look at what we eat – and how some foods mess with
natural hunger signals and weight point. Then we must examine why we eat, which can have a huge impact on how your body ultimately processes and stores fat.
Let’s start ‘what’
I seen for to subscribe to any particular diet. I call paleo to plant-based, so I don’t different patients, from low carb different ways of eating work myself “diet agnostic” – I’ve think it’s very individual. What I do believe is that what we eat can directly influence how much we eat. And in almost 20 years of seeing patients, I’ve learned that one of the most powerful pieces of health advice I can give anyone is this – eat (more) real food. What I mean by “real food” is food that’s minimally processed, close to its natural state and instantly recognisable
– fish that looks like fish, meat that looks like meat, vegetables that look like vegetables, and so on.
This one simple habit has three almost magical benefits: ● You’ll feel less hungry. ● Your body will automatically manage your weight for you. ● You’ll be less tempted to eat what I call “blissy foods”.
Real foods not ‘blissy’ foods
These are ultra-processed products that are about as far away as possible from real foods.
They’re created by scientists to be utterly irresistible to the human brain – and they tend to be high in calories.
Once opened, it’s extremely hard to stop eating these chocolate bars, crisps, sweets and salty, fatty meals, and they have been engineered to hammer at your hunger signals. Our brains are wired to uniquely respond to a few specific properties in food, including certain kinds of carbs, starch, sugar, protein, fat and salt. When our food contains these flavours in certain combinations (salted caramel being a prime example), the brain releases a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine helps create intense feelings of reward, and this motivates us to repeat the behaviour – eating those blissy foods over and over again. It may feel like your brain is working against you, but it’s actually trying to help. It’s wired to seek out as much high-calorie food as possible so it can keep you alive.
Fixing a wonky hunger signal
If you’ve been making a habit of eating blissy foods it’s no surprise your hunger signal isn’t working properly. Highly processed foods switch the body into a survival mode called inflammation (linked, as it happens, with many chronic diseases of ageing).
Inflammation makes it harder to pick up “I’m full” signals from a hormone called leptin. The easiest and best solution I’ve come across is simply to save blissy foods for occasional treats.
Another way to think about them is as one-ingredient foods. They’re the foods that don’t come with ingredients labels – wholefoods like vegetables, fruit, lean meat, wholegrains, fish, eggs, nuts and seeds and pulses. Have you ever noticed that we don’t crave these sorts of foods? They don’t naturally come in combinations of fat-salt-sweet. They’re not designed in a lab to stimulate dopamine release in your brain. Nor do they drive up inflammation. They work with your body, not against it. OK, there are times when you’ll need to buy foods in a packet, with an ingredients list.
And of course it’s OK to create dishes from scratch using one-ingredient foods that end up having many ingredients in them. But try to avoid single products with long lists of more than five ingredients.
Avoid gobbledegook names too. These simple rules will dramatically reduce your consumption of blissy foods – and you’ll be amazed at the far-reaching consequences.
If you manage to stick to a diet of real food, the better you will feel and the easier you will find it to lose weight.
Feel Great Lose Weight: Long-term, Simple Habits for Lasting and Sustainable Weight Loss (£ 16.99, Penguin Life) is out now. Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s new show starts on BBC Radio 2 on January 24, 10pm
It’s no surprise your hunger signal isn’t working if you’re eating blissy foods