As we explored in my last post, diets don’t work. Making huge, sweeping and sudden changes to your diet, to the point where it looks nothing like what it did before, leads to burn out and failure of weight loss at a rate which is reported to be approximately 95%.
But what about the other 5%? What do they do to maintain their weight loss?
Slow and steady wins the race
Those people who successfully manage to lose weight and keep it off tend to have one thing in common.
Their diet was sustainable.
It is very much a tortoise and the hare situation here. Consistently, I see as a dietitian that those who go in all-guns-blazing, obliterating every part of their diet that they deem “unhealthy” and only following what they deem as good, will crash and burn at some point. They may see the weight come off faster at the start. They may also feel motivated, empowered even, to take their health into their own hands and may even enjoy the way that the changes are making them feel. However, if those changes aren’t sustainable and can be maintained long term, what’s the point? (Well, technically there is a point, because even short term weight loss with regain has been shown to improve biomarkers such as cholesterol and insulin sensitivity- that being said, you’ll see far more of a benefit if you can keep those changes up long term).
The reality is, is that making and maintaining dietary changes is hard. There are hundreds of reasons that we eat the way we eat, and not all of them are because of the taste. Unfortunately, most diets require huge dietary overhauls which will not work with our lifestyles or our motivation long term. What can we do instead of dieting then?
The compounding power of change
Making small, sustainable changes every day, consistently, for a significant period of time, and slowly adding to these is key when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off for good.
It may be that you decide to consistently eat one more piece of fruit in the day, or that you decide to switch the mayonnaise you’re eating to the light version. Whatever the change is that you decide on, make it small enough that you can stick to it consistently.
I do this myself when setting myself New Years resolutions. Whilst I am not aiming to lose weight, I am always aiming to improve my diet for the better. 2024’s changes included eating 30g of nuts every day, 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil a day, adding another piece of fruit or veg into my diet, making my own bread rather than buying from the shops and making the swap to wholegrain carbs. I added these in slowly over the year, only moving onto the next change when I was consistently making all of the changes that came before it.
This principle is fantastically helpful for anyone wanting to lose weight, as it keeps your diet pretty much the same and allows you to focus on one, maybe two changes over the course of a week before moving onto the next. Of course, this will only work if you consistently both stick to the changes and aim to build upon those changes over the long term. But, if you manage to make 1-2 changes every week and stick to them, across the course of a year you will have made 52-104 changes to your diet. This, ultimately, will lead to a diet which looks nothing like your original diet, and because the changes were gradual, means that the total dietary change is far more easy to stick to and less overwhelming than making all of the changes at once.
But, won’t this mean I won’t lose weight as fast?
Absolutely it will. Your weight loss will be much slower than it would be if you made all the changes at once. The difference is, you might be able to make all the changes at once and stick to it for a few weeks, but making them slowly over the course of a year or two significantly increases your chances of making these changes for life.
It is important, both for our own mental health but also for our motivation and expectations of dietary change, to get rid of the notion that you should lose huge amounts of weight over a short period of time. This belief that we can just diet for a few weeks and reach our goal weight is ultimately a toxic one; it makes us make unsustainable changes, but also guilts and shames us if we don’t make that weight, further increasing our likelihood of giving up. At the end of the day, if you see rapid results, but then the changes that created those results get reset back to zero, you’ll end up back at square one. If you make small changes which elicit slow results, but build on those changes, you’ll see huge results in a year from now.
The next time you decide to diet, ask yourself; do I want this to be a lifestyle change? If so, slow and steady wins the race.
Diets Debunked 