Snakes and Ladders is a game that we may have all played or experienced at some point in our lives.
You know where the game starts on the board and you know where the end is, but there are many different routes you can take and an infinite number of outcomes.
If you’re lucky, you’ll have a steady and clear run to the top of the board, gradually climbing up using the ladders, the odd snake getting in they way that may cause you to slip back down, but you’re soon back on the ladders weaving your way up and eventually getting to the top. On the other hand however, you may fast track yourself up half way or maybe even make it practically to the end, only to hit that long snake and end up sliding all the way back down to the start. So it’s time to re-group and start from scratch all over again.
This may sound all to familiar if you’ve ever slipped into our ever growing culture of yo yo dieting. This can be referred to as Yo-Yo or snakes and ladders dieting approach .
Our Primative Past And The Present
Over the last few millennia our amazing bodies have developed an incredible system to keep us alive through periods when food may have been scarce, to have the ability to store food in the form of fat for use during the lean and scarce times. In the times when our function on earth as hunters and gatherers was to survive. There was no such thing as a Tesco Express or corner shop if you felt hungry! This is wonderful system, but it’s also a major problem nowadays for everyone who lives with food mountains and easy access to an excessive lifestyle rather than famine. Although we’ve evolved beyond a primitive lifestyle, we still have the survival mechanisms in place, so whenever we seriously restrict our calorie intake our bodies will naturally assume there’s a food shortage and hold onto the fat we’ve got stored in case things get worse. But we need to stay alive so we start burning lean muscle tissue instead.
The effects of extreme diets on the body
Every time you go on a crash diet, drastically reducing calories and cutting food groups out, you play a risky game with your body’s systems and are going to lose essential muscle until your body adjusts itself to getting fewer calories. The chances are that by the time your body has made this delicate adjustment you’ll have given up on the diet, so when you start eating normally again your body is overwhelmed with the extra food and starts by storing it straight back on as fat on your body. Your metabolism (the rate at which your body burns those calories) can remain lower than usual for weeks after you finish your diet. Your body remembers how much fat you used to have and wants to put it back quickly in case you suddenly start dieting again (which most people do!) as its function it that of survival and not body image.
The Fire That Burns Within
A commonly asked diet related question is “If I just eat one meal a day instead of 3 will I lose weight as I’m not eating as many calories?” 1 meal a day really is one of the worst things you can do. Think of your body as a fireplace; that fire represents your metabolism and the logs are the foods that you eat. If you disappear for the day and leave the fire unattended, the chances are that when you come back to it in the evening it will almost be out.
You might stoke it up with logs to get it going again, but the embers won’t be hot enough to get them burning. When you look at the fireplace the next morning, you might find your logs from the night before are still lying there, a little charred, perhaps, but not burnt up. If you have a habit of going for long periods without food, your metabolism will slow right down.
Perhaps you’re working hard so you skip lunch, finish work late and stop for take away on the way home. By that time, of course, you’ll be feeling pretty hungry and probably make bad food choices because your blood sugar levels have crashed through the floor, your metabolism will have virtually given up by then.
Eating a big meal and going straight to bed means you’ve got less chance of digesting that food quickly and burning it up. It’s much more likely to be turned into fat and stored. If you eat small amounts regularly, (stoking your fire) you will have a better chance of using it up as you go along. So the key to successfully dieting is to be consistent with your eating patterns and not put your body through constant phases of binging and purging which is ultimately what you are doing with quick fix crash diets.
Examples of Yo Yo diets
Most of us have heard of diets such as the Atkins diet, which cuts out the food group carbohydrates. While a lot of A list celebs were keen followers a few years ago, nutritionists were un-impressed with the famous restricted diet. Does cutting out a food group actually help people to lose weight in the long term? Evidence suggests using The Atkins diet as an example, is that when you cut out carbohydrates and eat high protein you will lose weight, as protein is very sustaining and people end up eating less calories.
That causes them to lose weight — it’s not because they cut out the carbs.
However the side effects are the headaches, lack of energy and the wastage of muscle as your body starts to canabalise or eat its own muscle for fuel. It’s a fact that cutting out food groups means your diet is not balanced and is missing important nutrients to nourish your body. A nourished body tends to have good structure and form and means you can fire on all cylinders as it has and can utilise the right fuel that it has.
The Facts
The Independent posted an article in July 2008 stating that “Restricting what you eat will make you fat. Worse still: Yo-yo dieting can cause depression, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. Frequent dieters are 60 percent more likely to die from heart disease than people who don’t starve themselves.”
One of the most popular published books on the effects of dieting was published in 1980 by Geoffrey Cannon called -Dieting Makes You Fat. This was groundbreaking a quarter of a century ago, but its strong and powerful message is even more urgent today.
As people are getting fatter (a government report from 2007 predicted that by 2050 most British adults will be obese), the market for weight-loss products is growing.
The dieting industry in the United States is worth approx $46 billion a year; in Europe it is worth approx €93 billion.
Clearly, our appetite for losing weight is not matched by our capacity to actually shed fat. Relating to these crash diets, the most up to date report in the 2007 UCLA review concluded: “We found that the majority of people who followed crash diets regained all the weight, plus more. … Most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all.”
When we look at the difference between the energy our bodies burn at different weights and with different body compositions, whether lean (physically fit but not necessarily light) or fat (not necessarily heavy, but with a high proportion of body fat to lean tissue) – a lean woman who weighs 70 kilograms (154lbs) burns 600 calories more at rest per day than a woman who weighs the same but has a lot of body fat. When we starve our bodies of essential calories which result in our vital energy supplies, we in fact start to eat away into our bodies own muscle for fuel and as we can see from the facts we need lean muscle tissue to support a healthy metabolism,
The ‘non diet’ approach -Digging our bodies out of the dieting trap.
Many yo-yo dieters believe that the “right” way to eat involves deprivation and food restriction and many of them may also think that denying their bodies of what they’d really like to eat is a sign of good health and taking good care of yourself. They will more than likely divide foods into good foods and bad foods, or confess that if they ate some junk food on a given day that they were bad that day and that they had to be really good and diet even more to make up for their bad behaviour. That could be deemed as a bad relationship to have with food – but is extremely common.
If we could listen to our bodies and have a less regimental approach to our eating habits we could see better results in our health and wellbeing and in turn with the appearance body shapes. An Intuitive eating, or non diet approach is being able to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. The key is being the expert of your own body by listening to its messages and being able to distinguish the physical from emotional cues
We need to learn how to trust our ability to meet the needs of our body, which takes us back to our hunter gatherer beginnings, and distinguish between physical and emotional feelings, and retrain or develop a certain wisdom of our own bodies. On the surface this may sound easy, but it is rather complex and take time. For someone with a history of chronic dieting or rigid healthy rules about eating, it is very difficult to accomplish because a number of issues or a case of being so set in our ways that need to be worked on, some of which seem very alien and counter-intuitive. After all, dieting can be about feeling in control and following intuition can feel a little like losing this control to an extent.
As modern day adults, we eat in response to the clock, the latest diet, social cues, or uncomfortable emotions. However, events conspire throughout our lives to encourage us to ignore our bodies’ signals. As children, we ate in response to internal cues, we tended to eat whatever our bodies needed and could generally stop eating when we were full. So the key to our health could be that we need to revert back to the mechanisms and relationship we had with food in our adolescent years and in turn start tuning into our intuitions and body systems.
What do you reckon?
