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Ben Carpenter has been a personal trainer since 2006 and has gained a loyal following on Instagram by debunking health and fitness myths online. His book All About Fat Loss: The Definitive No Bullshit Guide was released last year.
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As the month of January draws to a close, it is estimated that about 80% of people those who made diet commitments for the New Year will have abandoned them. And with several studies showing that it’s difficult to stick to a diet long term, Carpenter says the “common pattern” of diets means they don’t work long term.
I entered the fitness industry 19 years ago as a young, oily-faced teenager. I didn’t know what my career path would look like. I just knew I loved working out and I loved the idea of coaching people face-to-face to help them achieve their fitness goals.
Initially, my clientele was very diverse. It didn’t matter if you were young or old, a professional athlete or a complete beginner, I was happy to train you if we both thought we could help you. My client list included teenagers wanting to get in shape for their next vacation, fitness models wanting to diet for their next show, billionaires just wanting to fit an exercise routine into their busy schedule, and senior citizens simply wishing to improve their quality of life. life and I hope to live a little longer.
It didn’t take long for it to become increasingly clear that the most popular request from customers was to lose body fat. Sure, some people wanted to improve their fitness, get stronger, or build muscle, but, ultimately, the overwhelming majority of people who hired me wanted to diet in one form or another. If you asked everyone who joined the gym in January what their fitness goals were, I’d bet a lot that the most common answer would be about weight loss.
This forced me to change direction. In an effort to better serve my clients, fat loss became the topic I researched the most, the topic I began to specialize in by talking about nutrition science on social media and the subject I ultimately wrote an entire book about.
In my opinion, diets don’t work. At least, not in the way they are typically prescribed and monitored. Historically, diets have been used as a temporary phase of food restriction. For example, if you want to lose weight in January, you might buy the latest diet book and find yourself following the plan that’s popular at that time. Maybe it’s a low-fat, low-carb, or ketogenic diet. Perhaps it’s intermittent fasting (like the 5:2 diet, the 16:8 diet, or the one-meal-a-day diet). This may be the latest revolutionary DNA genotype diet or any other plan that a big weight loss company sells you.
Regardless of your choice, unfortunately there is a common pattern: you change what you eat, you see results for a little while before you start to feel like the diet plan is getting harder and harder to follow. Eventually, sooner or later, you realize that you’ve lost weight, but the diet has also robbed you of much of the joy in your life, so you tune in and go back to what you were doing before.
It is estimated that almost half of adults proactively try to lose weight each year. A multitude of scientific studies have shown that although people tend to lose weight easily in the short term, the majority fail to maintain it and regain at least some of the weight they initially lost. .
We probably all instinctively suspect this, don’t we? After all, the term “yo-yo dieting” is well-known for a reason. While there is a never-ending treadmill of different weight loss diets, there is a distinct lack of data showing that a specific type of diet produces significantly better results in the long term (think several years rather than a few months) .
All weight loss diets seem to work in the short term, but they often fail later, to the point that even after 12 months no specific diet is clearly superior to the others.
Why is it? Well, that’s a tough question to answer, but the reason we simplify it is because basically people don’t want to follow this plan forever. Regardless of the diet chosen, adherence rates tend to decline over time, which correlates with diminishing weight loss results.
Basically, if you start a diet that you don’t like in the short term, the likelihood of you sticking with it in the long term is only a tiny bit above zero. This is a very important issue because people commonly report that not losing weight is the main reason they decide to stop exercising altogether.
What happens if a large number of people join the gym in January, determined to lose weight, and quickly hit a weight loss plateau because they stopped wanting to stick to their diet (often too restrictive)?
Unfortunately, not only do they stop dieting, but they also often stop exercising. This is likely one of the reasons why a large portion of people who join the gym in January stop exercising regularly by the end of the year, with some gyms estimating that 60% of new members stop coming during the first three months.
Traditional diets work, at least in the sense that they provide reliable short-term results. However, most people don’t actually want short-term results, do they? When you combine the high dropout rates and lack of long term weight loss success, I find it very difficult to support the practice of people randomly buying the latest and greatest diet book hoping that it will magically lead to better results than the last diet they followed. try.
It’s currently common for people to begin dieting by abruptly switching to overly aggressive practices that they can’t maintain for long periods of time, often perpetuating a yo-yo weight cycle.
If you’re like most people and want to improve your health and change your body composition for the rest of your life, it makes sense that you wouldn’t approach your long-term goals with habits that you can only maintain. ‘short term. I think the health and fitness industry would be a healthier place for everyone if this became more widely known.
So if you’re in the subgroup of people who feel trapped in a constant yo-yo dieting cycle, what could you do instead? It might be a good idea to focus on sustainable behaviors that you can (hopefully) maintain for many years or even decades. For example:
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Try to find any form of exercise that you enjoy and use it to increase your physical activity level. Don’t worry about whether it’s the “best” exercise modality or not. The majority of people fail to meet basic exercise goals for aerobic and resistance training, so doing something is inevitably better than nothing. If you truly enjoy something, the likelihood of you sticking with it is bound to increase, right?
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Instead of just focusing on losing weight when you exercise, focus on something else that promotes health, like getting stronger or improving your cardiorespiratory fitness, which can improve your health even if the figure on the scale does not change.
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Increase or decrease individual habits that will likely improve your health. For example, eating more fruits and vegetables, cutting down or quitting smoking, and minimizing alcohol consumption are all good ideas, even if you’re not losing weight.
Of course, if you adopt these good habits, your body composition might change as a side effect, which you might enjoy. But you can rest assured: These are all healthy ideas, whether the number on the scale moves or not.
Edited by Harriet Sinclair
