Breaking the Stop-Start Diet Cycle

A sizeable portion of women over 40 have spent their entire adult lives bouncing between “healthy eating” or weight loss diets. Going from Weight Watchers to Slimming World to meal replacement diets and nowadays to Mounjaro or other GLP-1 agonist medications. Listen, I get the appeal of these approaches. They promise the holy grail of weight loss – results without the hard work. But measured over a longer time horizon, do these approaches really provide you with your ideal end result?

Judging by the overwhelming prevalence of women still stuck in the “stop-start” cycle of dieting, I’d wager that these supposed magic bullet strategies really aren’t doing the trick. Sure, they work in the short-term. And for ladies who are incredibly unhappy and frustrated about how they look and feel, this quick fix can feel incredibly alluring. But over the course of a year or two, things rapidly fall apart.

Let me ask you this: is a weight loss or body image intervention really worth the work if you’re only at your ideal weight for a few weeks before ballooning back up? Or if the negative health consequences of your weight loss strategy outweigh the few lbs off the scale?

Perhaps, after decades of societal pressure and expectations, it’s about time we shifted the conversation from one of women’s body image and weight, to one of women’s health. In this article, I want to talk about a more sophisticated, long-term and health-centric approach.

I want to start by putting time in the spotlight. Time is the main missing ingredient from the collective conventional approach to health and weight loss in women. The tendency of the modern woman is to focus entirely on what she wants to change about her body in the absolute shortest time possible. This mindset is the biggest obstacle we work against when helping the members of our over 40s ladies group finally make a change for good. A short-term mindset more often than not yields short-term results. When driven solely by a short-term mindset, women are more likely to make unsustainable and drastic decisions in their approach to changing their body. Crash diets, hours of cardio and surviving on bird food results in drastic weight loss, but at what cost?

Firstly, although you lose weight, a large percentage of the weight you lose when you make these drastic changes is not fat, but muscle. Muscle is the tissue that provides the desirable “shape” to your body. If you want that toned look, you want to protect your muscle. Not only this, but muscle is protective of your heart, brain and organs. More muscle helps improve your insulin sensitivity, reducing your risk of type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and a whole host of chronic diseases. Diet this muscle away at your peril.

Secondly, when you’ve lost all the weight you wanted to, what next? You’re surviving on an eight-year-old’s diet, and you’re miserable. Sooner or later, your resolve is going to break. When you do go back to eating “normal” foods, you’ll begin to put the weight you’ve lost back on (and often end up even heavier than before you started). This is due to a combination of the “all-or-nothing” mentality, meaning you open the proverbial floodgates and can’t seem to stop eating all the foods that were outlawed on your diet, and the fact that due to your drastic decrease in muscle mass, your metabolism has significantly slowed down. This is to say nothing of the destructive effect these unsustainable approaches have on your hormones, your social life, your mental health and your sleep quality.

Put simply: short-term mindsets result in long-term misery.

It’s time for another way.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with having a short-term goal. Wanting to achieve something in the next 6-weeks is a perfectly normal and healthy thing to do, and we encourage it in our ladies only over 40s group. However, we try to instil the understanding in our ladies that the end of their first 6 weeks is the beginning of the rest of their life. I take absolutely no joy in someone getting amazing results in their first 6 weeks if they go right back to square one once they’ve finished. To break the stop-start cycle of dieting, we must adopt a long-term vision to accompany our short-term goal.

Developing a long-term vision is easy to talk about and difficult to do. While a 6 or 12 month plan is beneficial, many of us struggle to think that far into the future and delay gratification for that length of time. To help with this, there are a few things I’ve learned over the last 12 years I’ve been working in women’s health that I think you’ll find really useful.

One thing I’ve found pretty consistently with myself and all the ladies I’ve worked with is that people are considerably more motivated by the avoidance of negative consequences than they are by the excitement of achieving a result. The reasons to consistently exercise, eat well and look after yourself are endless, but we’re often more motivated by realising we can drastically reduce our risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke, cancer and all manner of other conditions than we are by dropping a dress size. That doesn’t mean the dress size isn’t motivating, but it helps in the long run to remember the health consequences of not sticking to your health and fitness protocols.

The concept of “inversion” thinking, popularised by Charlie Munger, involves flipping the script and planning how exactly you’d bring about the exact opposite of what you want. Applied to our situation, we could map out exactly how we could increase the probability that we develop a life-limiting or threatening disease. There are no guarantees, but if I really wanted to increase my chances of developing a chronic disease like Alzheimer’s I’d make sure I never set foot in the gym again, I ate as many processed carbs as possible, got very little sleep and stressed myself out as much as I could. That should give you a clue as to the main things to prioritise if you want to reduce your chances of developing those diseases.

The real cheat code when it comes to creating a sustainable change in your body that you can keep for life is to fall in love with what you must do to achieve it. I know that doesn’t seem helpful because you hate the gym and rabbit food tastes like, well, rabbit food. But it doesn’t need to be that way. If you design an approach that works for you, you enjoy the exercise (in a community of like-minded women), you build the strategy around your lifestyle and commitments (instead of trying to change your life to suit a diet), then you can and probably will love the new lifestyle you create. At the very least, you’ll fall in love with how it makes you feel and see the benefit of continuing with it.

This is why it’s so important to approach your health journey with a long-term mindset from day 1. Approaching things with a short-term mindset and making unsustainable choices with your diet or exercise regime means you’ll never love the process, because you’re simply viewing food and exercise as a way to lose weight, rather than tools to nourish your body, improve your health, revitalise your fitness and give you a sense of belonging in a community.

You must, above all, understand that fitness is a use it or lose it kind of game. It’s fine to take a break or have a week off now and again. But the longer you stay away from the gym, the more you set yourself back when you do eventually come to pick it up again. Quitting on yourself has real consequences.

To conclude, stop-start diets are exciting and eye-catching for one simple reason: they work. But they only work in the very short period of time after you first embark on them. They offer no long-term health benefits to speak of and no advantage of sustainability. There are no quick fixes worth having and nothing worth having comes without a certain degree of work or sacrifice. The best approach is, as it always was, to design a healthy lifestyle that meets your needs and fits in with your life, and stick to it.

If you need help doing that, we have a space for you inside our ladies only over 40s health and fitness group. We’re based on Wheatley Hall Road in Doncaster, and we’ll be accepting new applicants to our group very soon.

Thanks for reading.

Andy Clements

Head Coach & Owner

DC Personal Training