Dieting and Food Restriction
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Dieting and Food Restriction

What is the best way to lose weight and keep it off?

Dieting with a Weekend Break

• Any sort of diet is not the most effective way to lose weight and keep it off.
  
• By restricting food rigorously and then letting go on of the discipline on weekends, a person reinforces the belief that she cannot trust her own instincts to regulate herself naturally, that she cannot trust her body to respond naturally to hunger and satiety, that extreme behaviors and pseudo-controls are adequate solutions to problems that requires more substantial attention, and that she is incapable of achieving healthy eating habits.
  
• This person who feels so out of control of food is most likely feeling out of control of many other aspects of her life as well. Not a comfortable feeling.
  
  

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  The Ultimate Weight Loss Prescription

  
  I believe there is one "best" way to lose weight effectively and to keep it off. It is in some ways uniquely individualized for each person... based on a person's food preferences, and the sports they enjoy. Yet there is nothing new or special or revolutionary to learn. In fact, the challenge for us is returning to the intelligence of our instincts, to the age-old principles that we have always known, yet may have put aside or forgotten in our efforts to be always thinner and better and to live longer. The trick to maintaining a healthy, fit and thin body is feeding a healthy metabolism.
  
  This happens through healthy eating, a process that in some ways is self-obvious, yet at the same time, elusive. Healthy eating has little to do with dieting, food restriction, or extreme exercise regimes. Healthy eating is moderate eating, balanced eating and regular eating. It is eating that accompanies and is part of a healthy lifestyle of sleep and exercise, and that knows no extremes.
  
  • Eat regularly,
    
  • Eat everything and
    
  • Eat moderately,
    
  • Eat according to hunger, and
    
  • Indulge cravings with the trust and understanding that when we take care of our body, our body will return the favor.

  Maintaining a healthy eating lifestyle, accompanied by a healthy exercise regime, is particularly important as women age and metabolic changes occur through childbearing and menopausal life stages.
  
  

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  Diets Don't Work

  
  It's no surprise that diets are passe....they simply do not work.
  
  Despite the reluctance of people to trust their instincts in making food choices, and to make personal decisions about what to eat based on the needs of the moment and of their body, there are no reliable and foolproof formulas to follow to insure thinness, fitness and longevity. Learning to listen and respond to the body and one's own needs becomes key.
  
  Healthy eating is what it takes to keep a person fit and trim without engaging in destructive diets. Healthy eating lies in a person's capacity to trust and respect the body and its needs........ as expressed through hunger and satiety, the need to create and sustain enegry and growth, and the requirements of sociability. Contrary to common belief, it has nothing to do with fat-free or restrictive eating. Healthy eating is the ability to eat everything, as long as it is in moderation... to eat nutritious and varied foods on a regular basis, in the form of meals. There are no bad foods; there are only bad (formulaic, ritualistic, restrictive, compulsive) eating habits.
  
  Three points to remember:
  
  • The body is a machine that requires fuel on a regular basis to operate effectively. It needs protein for cell formation and growth and mental alertness, carbohydrates for energy, and fat for hormone production and neurological development in young people.
    
    
  • Dieting and food restriction of any sort (such as skipping meals, eliminiating certain food groups, etc.) is counterproductive in:
    
    • denying the body and brain what it needs in order to function well,
      
    • creating a palpable need to gorge as a natural response to starvation and deprivation,
      
    • and diminishing the healthy calorie burning function of the metabolism, slowing the metabolic function to the point where a person gains increasing amounts of weight on increasingly fewer calories.
      
      
  • Statistics show that children who diet have a greater tendency to become overweight adults. In addition, 95% of people who lose weigh through dieting regain their lost weight, and then some, within 5 years after the diet.
    

  When the body is given what it needs to feel satiated comfortably, it learns to regulate itself without the stricture of external forces. More important, the individual learns to trust himself or herself to make wise choices in feeding the body successfully, and the body to be friend and care-taker in return.
  
  

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  About Abigail H. Natenshon
  Abigail H. Natenshon, MA LCSW has been a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in the treatment of eating disordered individuals and their families for the past 28 years. She is co-founder and director of Eating Disorder Specialists of Illinois; A Clinic without Walls, and the author of When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Parents and Other Caregivers (Jossey Bass, San Francisco, October, 1999). Visit her web sites at www.empoweredparents.com and www.empoweredkidZ.com
  
  
  

  CONTACT:
  Abigail Natenshon, MA, LCSW
  Telephone 847-432-1795
  Fax: 847-266-9233
  Highland Park, Illinois 60035
  Contact Me
  
  

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