Do You Want The Bad News or The Good News?

Do You Want The Bad News or The Good News?

If you want to lose fat…I have some real talk bad news that the annoying YouTubers by their pools won’t tell you…you are probably going to have to limit your consumption of sweet baked items, salty snacks, chocolate and candy, ice cream, starchy side dishes, and pizza.

“The only reported management strategy that was related to weight loss in all intervention groups was limiting the portion sizes of problem foods.”

-Roe and Rolls 2020 [1]

I also have some good news for you Limit doesn’t necessarily equal Zero.

For long-term weight loss success, planning out and accounting for these more problematic food items MAY work better than complete avoidance.

This gets into the idea of flexible restraint vs. rigid restraint [2].

Some people do well with hard lines and some people do really well with moderation. What tends to be unhelpful for both our physical and psychological health and our long-term body composition results is thinking in black and white terms about food and life [3].

So find what works for you because being rigid and myopic about being flexible seems just a touch hypocritical.

You may need hard lines on some foods, but that doesn’t mean that other people do or that those foods are inherently evil.

You may be able to moderate certain foods and not others. You may be able to moderate certain foods and not others in certain situations. And other people are likely different from you in what works for them and that’s OK.

“No single discrete strategy was identified that definitively reduced discretionary choices in adults or children. However, restriction/elimination strategies (specifically reducing portion size) were consistently beneficial for reducing energy intake.”

-Grieger et al., 2016 [4]

Losing body fat and keeping it off is your journey. We are here to help NOT judge.

*Also, if you are myopic about the words dietary restraint being absolutely BAD… Schaumberg et al., 2016 [5] is a great read that may open your eyes to the nuances of this particular debate.

#GIVEAFIT

REFERENCES:

1. Roe, L.S. and B.J. Rolls, Which strategies to manage problem foods were related to weight loss in a randomized clinical trial? Appetite, 2020. 151: p. 104687.

2. Westenhoefer, J., et al., Cognitive and weight-related correlates of flexible and rigid restrained eating behaviour. Eat Behav, 2013. 14(1): p. 69-72.

3. Palascha, A., E. van Kleef, and H.C. van Trijp, How does thinking in Black and White terms relate to eating behavior and weight regain? J Health Psychol, 2015. 20(5): p. 638-48.

4. Grieger, J.A., et al., Discrete strategies to reduce intake of discretionary food choices: a scoping review. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act, 2016. 13: p. 57.

5. Schaumberg, K., et al., Dietary restraint: what's the harm? A review of the relationship between dietary restraint, weight trajectory and the development of eating pathology. Clin Obes, 2016. 6(2): p. 89-100.