How our Brain Works on a Diet

How many times have you dieted, reached your goal weight and then several months later find yourself disappointed and again dissatisfied with your body because you have gained the weight back? How many times does a headline or picture catch your eye about a diet program with testimonial after testimonial about the success of the diet program. Weight-loss advertising is good at promising a thinner, healthier future self. It’s also really good at making us feel bad about ourselves when the diet fails - we often blame ourselves, our bodies, our lack of willpower for the failure. In reality however, the diet failed, not the person. There are biological processes at play when we diet - dieting and deprivation lead to increased hunger, and increased hunger leads to increased caloric intake. We need to break out of the diet/deprivation mentality in order to make any forward progress and lasting change. Unfortunately, we can not create a healthy body, relationship with food and lifestyle through deprivation or starvation.

Several research studies show that our brains really do hate diets. On a study of mice, researchers discovered that brain cells actively prevent the body from burning fate when food is scarce. This makes sense when you think about what the brain is primarily made of - fat! Researchers hypothesize that this is an ancient survival mechanism that we carry with us from days when food was harder to come by. Also, researchers followed and tracked the progress of the “Biggest Losers” to find out that the majority of them gained weight back several years later. Weight loss also affects our satiety/hunger hormones and the feedback to the brain. Research shows that prolonged dieting disrupts this cycle and that our hunger will increase over time - this is key to understand if weight loss is to be sustained.

But enough about the physiological aspects of our brain on diets - lets dive into more abstract concepts - and how our beliefs can prevent us from losing weight.