When you decide to make healthy lifestyle changes, people are often ready to offer their advice on what changes you should make (I did this; oh, this worked for me etc. etc.). But beware—some of the most common advice can actually end up doing you more harm than good. Here we look at some thoughts on the “everything in moderation” mentality and cleansing/detox/fasting programs and, then at two more common lifestyle habits that simply don’t work. Lifestyle habits that don’t work suffer from two main problems.
First, they come from a desire for things to be really simple. Simple is attractive, but it has a dark side. If you are made to believe getting healthy is simple, and you struggle with it, the only conclusion you are left with is that something must be wrong with you. And this kind of thinking is negative and ultimately harmful to your motivation, self-image and confidence.
Second, they often carry a theme of extremism—if you were to eliminate or add this one thing to your life (we’ve all seen the adverts!!), superior levels of fitness, health and vitality are easily yours and in just one easy step….. And underneath it all, the major problem is an altered, dysfunctional perception of what our relationship to food and our own bodies should be. We treat food as if it is to be guarded and our bodies as though they must be beat into submission or we cannot make any progress.
EVERYTHING IN MODERATION…DELUSION IN ABUNDANCE
• This flawed idea usually goes hand-in-hand with the equally flawed “there is no such thing as a bad food.” There are some “edible food-like products” which have no business going in your body. They are not made of the stuff that sustains life. The major problem is that there are all kinds of weird “food” products with distorted chemicals that can disrupt your physiology. And the resulting dietary imbalances rapidly generate inflammation and a kind of hormonal static that can take weeks or months to clear. Eating a healthy food doesn’t work miracles in a positive direction—that’s just normal. That’s what your body expects—the only dramatic reaction that occurs is to unhealthy foods. A single dose of healthy food is one step forward. But a single dose of unhealthy food is more than one step back—it’s more like 10 big steps back.
• The other problem is how do you define “moderation.” I have big hands so does 1 ‘palm sized’ serving of bad food mean the same for me as a person with smaller palms? Having any type of junk food once a day isn’t moderation; it’s a habit. That’s your lifestyle. The other flaw is in people who eat ice cream once a week, but also eat a white bread once a week and fries once a week, etc. Because each item is eaten once a week, this is interpreted as moderation. Add them all up across the week and what have you got?? No, it’s not moderation.
• And lastly, keeping unnatural, unhealthy foods as a part of your life on a “moderate” basis keeps your taste buds and your brain’s reward system craving them. When you only have these foods occasionally, they don’t create the same intense cravings for more. This makes your life harder because you must walk around resisting temptation at every turn instead of no longer feeling a temptation.
• We are unhealthier as a society than we have ever been, which clearly suggests that this “everything in moderation” idea isn’t working out so well.
CLEANSING/DETOX/FASTING PROGRAMS
• It is a shame these programs continue to be so popular as they tend to be a lot of fiction without the science. Your liver continually works to detoxify the body. It starts working the moment you are born, and doesn’t stop until you die. Your body doesn’t need a “rest from digestion,” and it doesn’t need help from magical supplements or juices. These programs have been debunked so many times and in so many ways, but they are still big sellers because of the promise of a quick fix. As a result, the intense marketing around them continues to overwhelm obvious truth and common sense.
• Anyone recommending one of these programs to you is either selling them or is emotionally invested in their benefit. We make almost all decisions based on emotion—despite telling ourselves how rational we are—and once someone has decided to spend their money on a cleansing program, they must believe they work to avoid feeling duped and like they made a poor decision.
• If you don’t put toxins into your body in higher-than-average amounts, there is no need for special detox routines. Don’t “tox,” and there is no need to “detox.”
• An exception to this is for people with medical conditions such as a liver dis-function or someone with fatty liver disease (the result of too much sugar, alcohol or degraded fats in their diet.)
COUNTING CALORIES (AND THE “CALORIES IN VS. CALORIES OUT” MYTH)
Food is not our enemy, and we do not need to protect ourselves from its dangers by tracking every calorie or scrap of it. To do so is to disconnect ourselves from the value of food in the worst possible way. It treats food like nothing more than fuel and that is just the incorrect view of food. We are meant to enjoy food and we are meant to eat healthy food. These two are not mutually exclusive. Counting calories is tedious, time-consuming and a sure-fire way to never enjoy eating. “But don’t I need to make sure I don’t eat more than I burn?” No. And strictly speaking, it is impossible to measure accurately even if you did need to do this.
The laws of thermodynamics make the premise that “calories in vs. calories out” look true to people who don’t understand thermodynamics in biology. The problem is that we humans are self-aware. This seemingly small psychological truth has massive implications for our biology. In 2011, Yale University demonstrated that your belief about the healthfulness (or lack of it) of a food affected your body’s hormonal response to that food. Groups of people all fed the same amount of calories (actually, the exact same food), had significantly altered appetite-hormone responses due to what they read on fake food labels the researchers had made up. The “healthy/low-calorie” version left subjects hungry sooner after eating than the “unhealthy/high-calorie” version.
This would be impossible in the simplistic worldview of the energy balance equation where “a calorie is a calorie.” If you believe you ate something healthy, you will get hungry again sooner. When we study thermodynamics in nature and in the lab, this doesn’t happen. We humans are unique in our ability to consciously contemplate our world and the food we eat. And our thoughts about what we eat can affect our body’s reaction to it. It can be helpful to track what you eat to look for patterns of habits, but it is futile to track calories. Always choose real, quality foods first. This will give your body accurate chemical signals. It is apparent that 100 calories of sugar does not have the same affect on the body as 100 calories of broccoli so why do we continue to promote this flawed idea that it’s all about calories when it is really all about quality?
WEIGHING YOURSELF EVERY DAY
Because this is often a standard recommendation of people who have successfully kept weight off, it might seem like an odd choice for a lifestyle habit that doesn’t work. But while it might work for a short period of time in the very early stages of behaviour change, it tends to backfire beyond that time period. People who weigh themselves daily after keeping weight off rarely achieve high levels of health, because they are stuck in a flawed mindset about weight.
If you have kids, you don’t measure their height every day. You don’t really need to track the daily fluctuations in your pension plan. The value of weight as a measure of health is limited. Sure at 130 kilo’s, some weight needs to come off—that amount of weight is never healthy and obesity always promotes disease in a body. A daily change to weight just does not have a major implication on the direction of your health. The emotional reaction to the daily measurement, however, is often very significant. An emotional high or a low that has no real significance physically is of little value in developing a healthy mindset.
The other major problem is that weighing yourself daily disconnects you from how you physically feel on a daily basis. And this is essential for making permanent lifestyle change. In the years I’ve been a fitness professional working with clients who want weight loss, every person I’ve ever worked with who has a weight-loss goal is really seeking a better experience in their body. The exact form of that experience differs from one person to the next. But a number on a scale is not the real motivator—even if it appears an individual is heavily focused on it.
When you know what the real motivator is—usually it’s wanting to feel and look healthier and it’s liked to our emotions of how we feel—then that can provide lasting motivation. Unfortunately, we usually just assume this will be gained by lowering the numbers on the weighing scales however, a number fixed goal can never provide lasting motivation, especially when a challenge to your daily routine strikes. Daily weigh-ins over-emphasise the importance of something that just doesn’t matter all that much, especially when you’ve arrived at a healthier place. Do you feel a little better than you did yesterday? That would be a much better question to ask yourself on a daily basis.
WRAP-UP
A permanent shift toward a healthy lifestyle is only possible when we stop beating ourselves up—mentally and physically—and cease using ineffective, flawed, simplistic approaches to health. At Kiwifit we want everyone to live the best life they can live, and the only way to do that is turn away from negative and destructive practices, even if they are popular. Many of the lifestyle habits mentioned in our blogs are popular because they appear easy (we all want that quick fix) or are highly profitable to those who sell them. Popular isn’t the same as being healthy or effective when we are trying to change our health.
