Not another New Year's Diet.... "this year will be different"

How to lose weight - a diet for life, not just for New Year’s!
It’s that time of the year again. In this article I will discuss the rationale for NOT dieting this time around. Let 2025 be your year to pursue health, fitness & vitality in place of an elusive number on the weighing scale. I can show you how.

How would I know?
I founded my business thirty years ago this year. It was June, I had my fist weight-loss client. She was in her mid-forties, tired of dieting and unfit. Her clothes didn’t fit, she felt demotivated, despondent, depressed. No wonder! She had spent twenty five years of her life dieting so hard, restricting so much, & envying others who could, apparently, eat all they want and not gain weight. All she had to do was look at a donut and she piled on the pounds.

Sound familiar?
Of course it does. You’ve lived this. For decades.
By the time my business was established and New Year (1996) had come around, I had already met this story innumerable times. The New Year’s diet approach was just another iteration of the same story, one of weight gain, hard dieting, weight loss and a cycle that just repeats, year on year.

How, this time around, do we put an end to dieting? Forever?
Let me lay it out for you. In short, when you starve yourself (and you know you’ve done this), time and again, your body eats….itself! Sounds apocalyptic, right? But, left with no other option, your body will, in fact, consume its own tissue (mainly muscle) in order to survive. And we are built to survive famine, so it does this very well. When you want to lose weight fast, you know you can lose the pounds on a very strict plan, or with diet pills, on an Atkins plan, on any low-carb diet, or through severe (maybe vegan) restriction. These ALL work, in the immediate.

So what’s the problem?
The problem arises after the first diet or two you have tried, when your body, under severe restriction, went into starvation mode. Often we take up aerobic exercise at the same time (couch to 5k anyone?). It runs out of available sugars, avails of glycogen (sored carbohydrate in muscle and liver cells) and progresses quite automatically to breaking down muscle tissue as an energy source. Yes, it also breaks down SOME fat tissue and you lose water (glycogen is stored with 25% water) and it appears on the scale that your body is losing fat. Yay!

But the numbers lie. What is changing also is your body composition.
Have you ever pondered why very elderly people are often thin but feeble? Generally, this is the result of muscle wastage. This is NOT what we want. The fat tends to go nowhere. But muscle mass declines with age. When you lose muscle you lose power, strength and for the purposes of this topic, metabolism. So trust me when I say that you do not want weight-loss for the sake of weight-loss alone. It’s an ever-diminishing return, diet after diet. You do not want to consume your own muscle tissue. Weight loss at all costs is very costly indeed.
What you want to pursue is fat-loss, quite specifically. You want to retain muscle and therefore your metabolic rate. If you lose a lot of weight, as in say 10% of your body weight, then in and around 20% of it can be non-fat tissue, which is mainly muscle (Scientific American 2023 article). This is bad news for your metabolism, because if you regain that weight, much of it will go back on as fat. Combined with less muscle you are now fatter, with a lower metabolic rate. This means that the likelihood of putting on weight when you as much as look at a donut is increasing in likelihood all the time. Sadly.

So what can I do about this, today?
Regardless of what we eat, we lose muscle mass at a rate of 4 to 6 lbs of muscle per decade (according to Harvard Health, 2024) if we do not engage in regular strength training. And while that is not the subject of this particular article, it’s worth being aware of. In order to lose fat, retain muscle mass and stay strong, with a steady metabolic rate, we need to eat plenty of food. We need to focus on fruits (you may resist this notion), vegetables, protein (this you expected!), carbs (whole foods where practical) and good quality fat in small amounts (this is not a fat-free approach).

This sounds easy.

It really is.

But it feels hard.

Why?

Because if it were that easy you’d be doing it!

We need to change our relationship with food, with eating and with dieting. We need behavioural change support. Not discipline. Discipline comes and goes. Behaviours stick!

What are your behaviours around food? Do you skip breakfast? Do you diet hard on a Monday morning to end up starving by Wednesday afternoon? Do you eat well all day only to binge at night? Do you eat well all week, perhaps, only to throw caution to the wind on weekends? Do you eat the wrong foods, drink a little too much, or are you a mix of all of the above?

If you are confused as to where to start, then the good news is that it’s never too late to start. You can develop healthy eating habits form today, right this minute.

Let’s be specific
From today, begin to look at food simply as fuel to feed your phenomenal body. The machine (your body) you’re running is simply extraordinary. Every second it performs hundreds of billions of chemical reactions (mind boggling, but true). Together these make up your metabolism, or metabolic rate. Imagine buying the most gorgeous Porche and running it on tractor fuel! Well you simply wouldn’t. You’d respect it too much. And rightly. So then why do you treat your body like this? It’s worth pondering.
From today, begin to use every meal as an opportunity to put into your body what it deserves. Give it fuel, not filth! Stay hydrated, simply by drinking water and eating more fruit, vegetables, salad. Then give it space and time to digest. You wouldn’t keep filling the Porche fuel tank every time you see a pump. It would overflow, cause a mess and maybe even the odd explosion!

Buy only whole foods for the most part. Try to spend some time preparing and cooking food for the week ahead. Track what you eat by becoming aware of it. And enjoy.

You will find you genuinely enjoy this way of eating, when you embrace it. Stop fighting food! The result will be an easier relationship with food, less stress, more joy. Then, the happy bonus will be weight-loss. Not at the pace you have grown to expect, but at a pace the body can sustain. The immediate effect is one of improved energy, vitality and wellbeing. Not bed eh! It becomes self-perpetuating when this is your approach.

You will feel too good to want to let this go.
To get more specific with your weight-loss goals then you will need to follow a more structured plan. One that controls calories and meets your particular goals. But begin here, today, right now. From this place of ease, your calorie-controlled plan will seem a very natural evolution of this way of eating. Not a hardship. Not misery. But natural.