Adherence can be seen as a multi-stage process. To ensure a successful and sustainable diet it’s important to recognize where you are on the adherence timescale and continue to progress as your diet unfolds. Let’s take a look at the stages of adherence and then finish up with some additional ways to increase your diet sustainability and chances of success.
Inspiration
You try on those pants you haven’t worn since last winter and realize they’re a bit tighter around the waist than last year. You get this sudden jolt of energy—“damn it, I’m gonna get myself on a diet!” It’s a great start. The downside?—the feeling is short-lived. You put the pants back in the bottom drawer not to be seen again for a few months and the feeling is gone. But if you take advantage of that fleeting moment, it becomes the start of your diet journey. The moment of inspiration is what spurs you to take action.
Motivation
Motivation is goal oriented. Inspiration led you to do some research into starting a diet and afterwards you decide you want to lose 15 pounds in three months. Now you have a concrete, specific goal to achieve. The goal gives you, and the diet, a purpose. You’re psyched and ready to get started because you’re motivated by the end result. Motivation will carry you for days and sometimes weeks, but dieting can get tough and undoubtedly you’ll have times when motivation is low. No one is motivated all the time.
Intentions
Having a goal gets you motivated, but there’s some truth to the adage “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Intention is process, or plan, driven. A specific diet plan gives you a blueprint of how to achieve your goal. You can’t rely on motivation to carry you through the entire diet—tough times will come—but now you have a plan for how to get through the hard times. Intention is a commitment to yourself to stick to your plan even when motivation is low.
Discipline & Willpower
You set a goal and you made a commitment to follow through with your intentions when motivation is low. How do you apply this in practice?—discipline. Discipline uses willpower to follow through with your intentions. When you’re four weeks into your diet, a little hungry, craving pizza, and you take a look at your plan and say “nope, I’m sticking to my planned meal because I have a goal to hit”—that’s discipline. Discipline works and is necessary for diet success, but it’s unsustainable in the long-term because willpower is finite. Willpower recharges to some degree, but if you’re constantly using all your willpower over and over, eventually you’ll crack.
Habits
The point everyone should be striving for is habit. A habit is something you do without having to consciously think about—it’s autopilot. Imagine someone saying to you, “you brush your teeth everyday?—you’re so disciplined!”. Sounds insane, right? As a kid you had to think about it (or be forced to by your parents), but after thousands of reps brushing your teeth it became part of your routine without thinking about it. Early in a diet you’ll have to exercise discipline to stay on track, but if you stick with it long enough habits will start to form. Then you’ll have healthy routines in place that will stick around long after the diet is over.
Sustainability & Diet Success
Dieting is unsustainable by definition—you can’t diet your way to zero pounds—but it should be sustainable through the time course you set for the diet. Choosing a realistic time course is important because it sets your expectations of a concrete start and end point. Most people with little successful dieting experience should aim for a 6-12 week diet phase. Shorter than 6 weeks may not yield enough results to keep you motivated and won’t provide enough opportunity for habits to form. Longer than 12 weeks and your chances of psychological and physiological burnout will increase substantially.
Equally important is choosing a realistic rate of weight loss. If you’ve seen the show The Biggest Loser, some of those people achieve really impressive amounts of weight loss in a short time—unfortunately, almost all of them regain the weight or more. For long-term sustainability, aim for a maximum weight loss of about 10% of your total bodyweight in any one diet phase. So, if you weigh 200 pounds, aim to lose a maximum of 20 pounds on your diet of up to 12 weeks. Losing 20 pounds in 12 weeks—and keeping it off—is very impressive.
Lastly, the foods you choose to eat during your diet are important for diet success. The key to a fat-loss diet is creating a calorie deficit while feeling as full as possible to stave off hunger and cravings. Choosing lean proteins, veggies, fruits, and whole grains most of the time will help you feel more full without overeating calories. I’ll go much more in depth on this topic in the Food Composition article—stay tuned!
Kommentarer