John Lark

It seems this month there is a new diet book, approach, view or opinion thrust into our faces. The promises are huge. Drop a dress size in a week. Lose 7lbs in 7 days. Change your life forever.

Who knows? You may be ‘on’ a diet. And who can blame you? You want results – QUICK! These ‘diets’ promise you exactly that with their fluorescent book covers, powerful testimonials and ‘proven’ strategies for success.

You plunge in to them. You may even become a serial dietar (or is that ‘cereal’? dieter. I have to be careful, and no pun intended, on a well-known cereal producer’s ‘Drop a Dress Size by Eating Two Bowls of Dead Food Diet’)

Atkins, The Zone, The Cabbage Soup, The Grapefruit – whatever next?

It can become a frustrating habit. One that yields good, bad, indifferent or no results for people. You may give up the ghost and plunge back into the habit of sugar binges and drinking 5 cups of coffee for the ‘pick me up’.

Our experience with serial dieters is that like the diet themselves, they are fussy.

When an individual says they are on a specific diet – they aren’t really. They are on a piece meal version. The individual may take the bits of it they like and ignore the rest. Take for instance the Atkins. We all know that this is renowned for its rib sticking breakfast of sausages and eggs.

I would hazard a guess that most people would warm to this. However, the devil is in the detail. What about the inordinate amount of vegetables that are recommended alongside a certain formula of water to help with the detoxification process.

It is like me giving you a recipe for apple pie and you then making rhubarb crumble.

My point is simple. For any diet to succeed and in truth most, if not all will, you have to be compliant 90% of the time.

How do you measure this? Well we use a compliant grid. Let’s say you eat 3 meals a day for 7 days of the week. That’s 21 meals. 95% compliance means 2 meals where you can avoid the rules. Not a lot of lee-way. So ask yourself – do you understand entirely what is asked of you and have you followed all the rules 95% of the time?

Here is my problem with diets. You end up chasing more than one rabbit at a time.

This is ok if you are talking in short periods of time – say 2 weeks. However, any longer than that I would begin to question compliance. The proof is really in what the results say.

We approach nutrition from a behavioural point of view by asking our clients to focus on one habit at a time. One week it may be the water intake.  The next it may be breakfast. In total there are 10 habits for anywhere between 7-21 days per habit.

Why this period of time? Well some of us have that burning intrinsic level of motivation to make a change immediately. For 7 days they can focus their efforts on making a change before these habits become long-lasting. For some it make take a little longer i.e. 21 days. In fact studies have shown that habits take around this time to be forged.

Like any habit, nutrition is no different. It takes time to forge habits such as shopping for fresh foods twice a week or bulk cooking and bringing in left-overs with you to work.

However, the difference between this approach and all the diet books is ultimately it is more fulfilling. Imagine tackling one habit a week for 10 weeks. In 10 weeks you would have completely overhauled your eating habits – for the long haul. That could mean the difference between shifting the weight and not.

Like all goals success brings more success and there is nothing more fulfilling than setting a goal and snowballing your achievements.
So, it goes without saying that if you are thinking of trying a diet check with a healthy doctor first then ensure you make yourself accountable and can measure your results with it.  However, if you know that you have a terribly sweet tooth or just find it hard to eat right on the run then a diet book will not help.

Behavioural changes with forging new habits will.

More fat loss strategies for you to use and implement including a free sample meal plan and workout

www.spherefitnessstudio.com