episode 151: the science of change (aka why quick fixes never work)
Today’s episode of The Diet Diaries is a follow up to last week and talks all about how change actually happens in our brains and bodies including how we lose fat and develop more body confidence.
How do we improve body confidence?
Understanding the science of how humans adapt is essential to making changes to our habits and behaviors around eating, exercise and self care. The hard truth is that a quick fix to our weight, our behavior and our relationship with food is pretty much impossible, yet that’s what we’ve all been tricked into believing exists.
And is a HUGE reason why we’re all stuck in the yo yo diet cycle, hating how we look and endlessly struggling with negative body image.
Graded exposure is an evidence based approach to adaptation that is used in many therapies and treatments…but for some reason when it comes to anything about what, why and how we eat and how we look we always think the all or nothing approach is the answer.
So today I’m breaking down the steps you need to go through to create true, permanent change around eating, body confidence and body image insecurities.
Check out episode 148 of The Diet Diaries to learn exactly why you have body confidence issues and what to do about it.
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Welcome to the Diet Diaries, a podcast where we have candid, heartfelt conversations that will help you figure out what, why and how to eat so you can feel amazing in your body. Because it's time to break the all-or-nothing mindset of yo-yo dieting, food obsession and feeling ruled by the scale. I'm your host body image and nutrition coach, Jordana Edelstein. I'm so happy you're here.
Speaker 2
00:28
Hi friends, this is episode 151 of the Diet Diaries and real talk, because I'd just like to be honest with you. I started recording this episode a couple minutes ago and found myself just talking and rambling and not making sense and not knowing what I wanted to say. So I'm like, all right, just stop recording and start over. So this is going to air on Monday, october 30th it's the day before Halloween. Today's episode is kind of a follow-up to last week's episodes. If you haven't listened to 150 yet, listen. It's not a long one, it's like 18 minutes Today. I think it's going to be pretty short Because these are all skills that are relevant to Halloween, to upcoming holidays and the holiday season, which brings a lot of stress for folks. And, by the way, I am going to be doing a freebie for support around the holidays. I'm still working through it. Hopefully by the time this airs I'll have a kind of a little bit more fleshed out, similar to nourishing notes, like we did last year, which was the 30 days of like short daily notes, but a little different. So anyway, just wanted to let you know that's coming. Sign up for that will be coming soon and it's going to be free because we all need support, I think, around the holidays, with mindset and how to approach food and exercise and schedules and parties and all the things that make this type of year awesome but also different and sometimes really challenging both.
01:46
And so today I wanted to build on last week's conversation it's a one sided conversation because I'm just talking and you're listening, but you're having your own thoughts and response to whatever I'm saying and talk about why we always feel this need to make drastic changes at once around food and exercise, and I wanted to talk about just a couple of examples in other kind of realms of biology and physiology and psychology, where that kind of our good reminder that that's usually not the best way into things, that diving in and making a lot of drastic, extreme changes at once are never good. First of all, extreme behavior is never good on either side, whether you think it's hurting you or helping you. But we just have this thing. We have this thing around eating and exercise where we always go all in Like that's just what we do. It's kind of fascinating and my theory is that the reason we do that is because we get so uncomfortable with what we're currently doing and even more so more often what we're currently seeing in terms of what our bodies look like, that we feel this incredibly uncomfortable urge to fix it and do something about it, and so we go all in on some new diet or some new workout program. It's that need to get. We need that instant gratification to get the relief from that discomfort. I did an episode about this. I'll try to link it in the show notes not that long ago.
03:22
But the reality is like that's not how humans actually change by jumping into extreme behaviors. What's amazing about being human as opposed to like a robot and that might sound weird that I'm comparing it, but so often you'll hear people like compare humans to like machines, or we expect ourselves to always, every day, have the same appetite and be in the same mood and make the same choices. Like you're not a robot, you're a human, which means that you are constantly adapting and responding to all of the inputs around you, things you probably don't even realize you're responding to, which can make things really hard. For sure, being a human is very difficult, and also what the flip side of that is that we are capable of so much change because we do adapt and respond. We can do that in a very specific and deliberate way when we want to create a change. And so there's a concept called graded exposure, and I first learned about this when I was studying pain science, when I was teaching yoga and movement and strength. And the idea of graded exposure is very simple. It's just the idea of giving yourself very slowly, increasing the amount of exposure you have to a stimulus over time, right? So I won't get into like pain science, but I'm going to. I'm going to share some examples that I think will really resonate and kind of make sense to you. The first one is going to be around like strength training and whether or not you're familiar with strength training doesn't really matter, but you probably. If you haven't, I'm introducing it to you the concept of progressive overload. This is how you get stronger.
04:54
You don't basically get up off of the couch, not having worked out ever in your life or for a long period of time, and go pick up a 50 pound dumbbell, right, you would get hurt. You would get hurt. You're probably like hell, no, I'm not strong enough. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. Stop doing that. The pain is a signal to stop doing that so you don't injure yourself further.
05:15
It's kind of the same when you go on a crash diet and suddenly your brain's like, oh my God, this is miserable. Why are you doing this? Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Same thing too much too soon. It's not that 50 pounds is bad, it's just too much too soon. You have to work up to it. You got to start with five pounds. You do five pounds for a little while, then you go to 10 pounds. Do 10 pounds for a little while, then you go to 15. You get the idea Graded exposure on like a gradient. This is how anxiety and OCD.
05:40
A friend of mine is a therapist and specializes in treating people with OCD obsessive-compulsive disorder. It's treated by slowly exposing patients' clients to the thing that they are afraid of or that makes them feel obsessive, and helping them build up a tolerance to it and ways to deal with it. This is how immunotherapy works with food allergies. Someone who's allergic to peanuts is given micro doses teeny, teeny, tiny doses, like microscopic doses of peanuts, so their body can respond to it and learn to tolerate it. Then, very slowly, over a period of time it's years that dose is slowly increased so their body learns to respond to it and adapt. It no longer sees that food as a threat which it has to attack. It sees it as safe. Those are three, I think. Really, I'm hoping that one, at least one of those three examples resonates with you. You either know someone or you've heard about it, or it just clicks into your brain for like, oh yeah, you would never give someone who's allergic to peanuts hey, here's a peanut and expect them to be able to respond to it.
06:53
I know you might think that that's an insensitive comparison to going on a diet and trying to make changes around food. I'm to be very clear I have a lot of friends with food allergies. I'm simply using it as a way to illustrate the science behind how humans adapt, and we tend to want to ignore that science when it suits us. I think, when it comes to making changes around eating and exercise, we have to take a graded exposure approach and lean into the science of how the human body actually works and responds to stimulus in order to change the way we want it to change. What that looks like is, instead of saying okay, I realize that I have been overeating all the time, I'm snacking. All the time I don't know how to plan nutritious meals. I feel like I'm hungry all the time I'm not eating any protein. I just feel like I'm eating snack foods Instead of saying, okay, monday morning I'm going to have an egg white omelet and then for lunch I'm going to have turkey and low fat Swiss cheese on low carb bread, and then for dinner I'm going to have a grilled chicken breast with a quarter cup of steamed brown rice and steamed broccoli. We've all been there and done that, and you know how long that lasts not long because it's too much. It's not even too much too soon.
08:16
You never have to go that extreme because it's an extreme. That's an extreme behavior to begin with, but our bodies A and our brains can't adapt to that level of change coming off of where we've been. So instead you could pick, let's say, one meal. I'm gonna pay attention to breakfast and I'm gonna focus on getting some protein at breakfast. Let's say you're eating a chocolate chip muffin for breakfast every day. Great, maybe. Keep eating your chocolate chip muffin, but add a Greek yogurt to it, add two hard boiled eggs to it. Prioritize eating that protein and then have some of your chocolate chip muffin. Keep everything else the same. Do that for a week. Then on week two, maybe at lunchtime, you focus on adding some protein to whatever you are already eating.
09:04
Slow changes, graded exposure when I graded, I mean like on a gradient, because if you think about when you go into these all in extreme changes, you can only stay with it for so long. You inevitably quote fall off the wagon and go back to what you were doing. So let's say that happens over even like a several month period. At the end of that time you're basically back where you started and no change, no progress has happened, whereas if you took that several month period and made these slow, sustainable changes that your body and your brain had a chance to adapt to, at the end of that three months you'd actually be a lot further along, having made those slow changes, than doing the drastic changes and ending back up at square one again. The long way is the short way. That's kind of the way to capture that idea. We want to ignore the way our bodies adapt, how humans adapt, and think that we can just beat biology and you can't. It doesn't work. This is one of the really big reasons why extreme diets don't work. So I really this kind of.
10:20
It plays off of last week's episode, because we talked about unconditional permission around food and how to learn to have the foods that you're afraid of around. And it's the same way, right, I talked about buying one serving of a food that you have a lot of fear around, not a whole bag, not like 10 different sweets to have in your house. Buy one thing and practice with it and then, slowly over time, buy two servings of that thing and have them around, and then the next week or the week after buy three servings and then you work up to buying the whole box or whatever it is. It is that slow, sustained, consistent exposure that creates change. Right, you've heard the term neuroplasticity. That is basically very fundamental level, the concept that our brains are capable of changing right, changing actually in terms of different physiological functions, in the way we think, in some of our beliefs, and they happen slowly over time.
11:19
Right, especially around behaviors, because our nervous system really is protecting us and it sees what is familiar and comfortable as safe. Even if what's familiar and comfortable is at a detriment to ourselves, like the example I gave of how someone might be eating that's still seen as safe. And so if you take all that away from someone overnight right, diet starts Monday that is seen as a huge threat. The nervous system sees it as a threat. It doesn't see it as a positive change. It sees it as a threat and it creates a lot of stress, an excessive amount of stress that really you're just not really gonna be able to tolerate. So changing the way that we eat can create small amounts of stress, and that's not a bad thing, right? Not all stress is bad. Extreme amounts of stress are bad. Small to moderate amounts of stress are good. That's how we adapt and change, but it has to be done systematically and thoughtfully.
12:17
So I really just wanted to share this and notice the next time you get that urge to go all in. I mostly talked about food, I didn't talk about exercise, but it's the same thing, right. I talked about it in the concept of progressive overload for how you get strong. But let's say you're someone who has not been exercising and you're like, okay, great, I'm gonna join a gym and I'm gonna go to this class four times a week. If you have not been going to the gym at all, you are not gonna suddenly start going to a class four times a week consistently. You're just not. And that's not bad. It's just not how the human brain and body works.
12:45
You might do it for a week or two, but then you're gonna fall off. You have to go bit by bit. Say I'm gonna go to one class and go to one class the next three weeks. Great, show yourself that you can do it. Get the evidence Prove to your nervous system that this is kind of like the new comfortable, and then add on, then go to two classes, right. So then you're only increasing by one. You've already got the one under your belt, you're good. Then add one more, and I know you know what I'm talking about because you've done it. If, again, if you're listening to this podcast, it's because you're looking for support with all the changes around food and exercise you've never been able to make. So I know you've done this, I've done it too, and you haven't been able to make the changes you want to make. Because you keep doing those things, because you get uncomfortable with what you're doing, with how you look, with how you feel in your body, and you want to change that immediately. So it's like I'm gonna go all in.
13:37
We have to be able to sit in the discomfort of not going after instant gratification, of not getting a quick fix, of not expecting things to change overnight. Remember the long way is the short way. If you try to get the shortcut, the faster that you want to get the results, the shorter those results will live. I have a post about that from a long time ago. Basically like the quicker the results or the quicker the fix, the quicker the results are to stay. I mean they don't last. They're very short lived. They might come faster but they're not gonna stay very long, right? The longer it takes to get the results or the outcome, the longer it is that they're going to last.
14:21
So we can't ignore science. We always want to ignore how our bodies and our brains work. We do that with calories. We do that with things that make us uncomfortable. We want to like bypass them, ignore them and just pretend that we can like supersede that. But guess what Evolution says? You can't right. We've evolved over millions of years to be the complex beings that we are and we have done that and we exist in a way that those laws of science matter and if we lean into them and use them to our benefit, it makes a world of difference. So I hope this was helpful. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much for listening, thank you for being here, thank you for sharing the podcast, and I will be back next week. Somehow Shit Me Just Sounded Aware.
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