Cut it down, don’t cut it out. Far too often, the advice when, you’re looking to lose weight especially, is to cut this out, or cut that out. Honestly, it’s not very helpful advice. It might work in the short term, but it’s unlikely to work in the long term.
Let’s take a simple, and common, example of chocolate. Now, you might really enjoy chocolate, but you want to lose some weight. Well, chances are, the advice will be to cut that chocolate out of your diet, they’re simple calories you can remove, and it’s not that healthy for you anyway. And that’ll probably work initially, on the assumption that it puts you in a calorie deficit, but for how long?
One of three things is likely to happen in this scenario. One of those is that you cut chocolate out of your diet, and that’s it. It’s gone forever, you’re happy with that, and you can manage that. Another, is that after you lose the weight, you put the chocolate back into your diet, because you enjoy it. And what happens then? Well, you’re probably going to put all that weight back on, because you’re back to square one where you started. And the last thing? You might not last long at all on this new chocolate-less diet, and if the chocolate has got to stay, the advice has got to go.
The cynic in me says that, particularly the second thing, that’s the point of the advice. It’s designed to keep you in a vicious circle. You pay for advice, you lose the weight, you put it back on, and you go back to pay for advice again. And then you’re just going around and around. You don’t need to cut anything out of your diet, really. It’s much easier and much more manageable to just cut down slightly on multiple things. It’ll have the same effect, if it’s the same number of calories, except you won’t have to cut out things you enjoy. You’re more likely to adhere to that, especially after the weight loss. Cut down, not out. See you again next week.
Dan Miller
Body Fuel Personal Fitness Trainer