You’re trying to lose weight, and you’re confused by all the different dietary approaches out there. But they can really be grouped into 2 major categories:
Category 1: meticulous tracking of a nutrient. This can be tracking calories, tracking carbs, tracking protein, tracking fibre, just tracking something.
Category 2: intuitive eating. Listen to your body, since your body’s intuition will make the right decision.
The question is really: which one is better – tracking, or intuitive eating?
As with most things that I cover, the answer is really more complex than a simple choice. In here, we will cover the advantages and disadvantages of both options. And if you don’t feel like reading through this, and going through the trial and error of figuring this out for yourself, you can have one of our staff do it all for you. Just fill out this application form to see if you qualify to work with us.
Ready? Let’s go.
Original source: here.
Tracking
Many diets tell you to track something. Diets like Atkins, Bernstein, Poon, and others tell you to track grams of carbohydrates. Diets like Ornish and Pritikin tell you to track grams of fat. Diets like “Protein Power” shockingly tell you to track protein. And of course, there are others.
What are the advantages of such an approach? There are a couple:
- It brings you awareness to the composition of your meal. If you’ve never tracked anything before, after a couple of weeks of consistent tracking, you start to realize the composition of your meals. After some period of time, you almost have an internal calculator of the composition of every meal. You learn exactly what 2000 calories looks like, or what 30 grams of protein looks like, etc.
- Some people crave rules and structure. These are the more analytical types. Accountants, engineers, etc. If you tell them “just listen to your body”, it usually means very little to them. If they are overweight, and they listen to their body, they’ll continue to be overweight. But give them a hard and fast rule, like “don’t eat more than 2500 calories per day”, or “get 30-40 grams of protein at each meal”, that’s very helpful.
There are also a few disadvantages to tracking, like:
- Incorrect tracking. You might look at a nutrition chart, and see that a tablespoon of almond butter is about 100 calories. But that’s a flat tablespoon, where the butter doesn’t go above the rims, and doesn’t stick to the bottom of the spoon. Add in all the almond butter that goes above the rim of the spoon, and sticks to the bottom, and now you might be eating 140 calories, instead of your intended 100. And the same applies to other foods. Pretty soon, you’re eating 20-40% more than you think you are, and wonder why you’re not losing fat.
- You can’t track your whole life. Sometimes you eat certain foods, and you can’t find data for how much of a nutrient is in that food. Or sometimes, the data really varies between one resource and another, even when serving sizes are equal.
So now we know the major advantages and disadvantages of tracking your intake.
Intuitive Eating
Just as there are advantages and disadvantages to tracking calories, carbs, proteins, etc., there are also advantages and disadvantages to intuitive eating.
Advantages
- If you’re not a numbers person, you don’t have to worry about numbers. Just listen to your body’s hunger and fullness signals, and you won’t go wrong… in theory (not always in practice).
- It’s more flexible, in the sense that if a specific type of food on a meal plan is unavailable, you can still eat something satisfying to you.
Disadvantages
- Our intuition is wrong. A lot. Most of the population practices intuitive eating already. And most of the population is also overweight. Why? Because the modern world is meant to hijack your intuition. There are specific professionals called “food chemists”, whose entire job is to make food addictive, in the way that a drug is addictive. Think these nice folks can take over your intuition? You bet. That’s what they are paid to do, and they are very good at it.
- It may not work that well short-term (and of course, long term). In one study, researchers did a head-to-head comparison of how well intuitive eating works, compared to calorie counting. After 6 weeks, the calorie counters lost about 5 pounds. The intuitive eaters didn’t lose anything.
I find intuitive eating to work very well for the naturally thin. You know those people that tell you “I can eat whatever I want, and not put on weight?” Well, it’s not because of their fast metabolism (though that may be part of it). It’s because of what they want. You assume they want the same things you want: pizza or chocolate cake. When in fact, yeah, they may have that on occasion, but they don’t have the same cravings an overweight person would.
If you’re not the naturally thin person, intuitive eating, at least the way it’s portrayed in the media and bookstores may not be for you. Though there is a way to include intuitive eating in a way that’s OK. We’ll talk about that later.
How We Work With Our Clients
If you ask “what is the perfect diet?”, the answer to that is still “we’re not sure”, because research shows that a diverse number of diets improve health outcomes. Cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc. If you think that the paleo diet is the best thing in the world, there’s another study that shows a vegetarian diet to also dramatically improve a lot of health parameters. So then you think to yourself “ah-ha! So vegetarianism is the way to go.” When another study comes out, showing that people eating red meat actually improved some other parameter of health.
So really, with such heterogeneity in what a good diet really is, the good news is that there’s more than 1 perfect diet, which means that you don’t have to neglect your own preferences.
So what approach do we take with our clients? We actually use a combination of both tracking and intuitive eating. How do we do that, you ask?
Initially (first 2-8 weeks), we may give our client something to count. What’s the best thing to count? Is it carbohydrates, proteins, calories, something else? We simply put the emphasis of what to count on what we feel will give the biggest bang for our buck to our client (the fastest results, with the least effort). And since each client is different, different clients count different things.
This gives the client an awareness of what they are eating, and over that period of time, it’s ingrained, so after they stop the counting, they have a subconscious measure of the amount of a nutrient in whatever they are eating.
After that, we switch to intuitive eating. But we don’t just tell our client “OK, you’ve done the counting/tracking approach”, now just listen to your body. No, we go way deeper than that. We use a couple dozen techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy that allow the client to effectively listen to their body. By “effectively”, I mean that often, the body wants a pizza, or chocolate cake, which are obviously not conducive to fat loss.
So over time, it becomes easier to make good choices. Not completely effortless, but certainly easier. And when you go off track (which inevitably everyone does), it’s easier to come back on track.
If you’d like help figuring out what’s right for you, feel free to fill out this application form to see if you qualify to work with us.
