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Home » Diets that Work » Are We Stupid to Make Dieting a New Years Resolution? – Psychology Today

Its that time of year again. Youve reveled your way through December and now youre feeling guilty about your excesses and upset that your jeans feel too snug. Its January 2020, a new day, a new year, a new you, and this timeno more junk food! Or so you promise yourself.

According to a digital poll conducted by the Insider at the end of 2018[1],nearly 50% of New Years resolutions are about dieting or healthier eating, yet the evidence shows that by the secondweek of February 80-90%[2], of these resolutions have failed. Why do we keep making well-intentioned resolutions about restricting our intake of fatty, sugary foods, and then consistently relapse? Are we stupid to continuously make such futile promises?

Sisyphean attempts to change our eating behaviors suggests that were not very good at learning. But that nod to our foolishness would be to gloss over the problems underlying why we push that rock up the dieting hill eating every January only to have it roll down on our thighs by Valentines Day. There are three main reasons for our repeated dieting failures: 1) habits, 2) the food environment, 3) our biology, and theyre all extremely hard to alter.

Firstour well-learned habits. Do you make a daily stop for a pastry or milk-shake latt on your way to work? Do you mindlessly snack at your desk? Do you automatically say yes to fries with that sandwich? In order to change our eating behavior we first have to figure out what our bad eating habits are, which is not so easy. Then we have to break the mold on all those automatic routines. This means crushing habits from breakfast to our midnight snack, at home, work and play. Put this in the face of the fact that a central reason why changing behaviors so often fails is that people try to change too much at once. For best success, we need to make a list and slowly tackle one bad habit at a time. This itself is a tedious task, which only adds to the burden of restricting our eating. Eating is among the greatest pleasures of existence and we have to do it fairly constantly. This means that if we make eating unpleasant we wont give up eating, well give up making it unpleasant.

Next, is our perilous food environment. Even if you dont have much money (in fact its worse if you dont have much money), unhealthy food is more accessible than fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish. Our Western eating environment offers a plethora of relatively inexpensive, high calorie, delicious options with very minimal effort involved in getting any of it. You dont even need to leave your couch except to answer the doorbell for that UberEats delivery. There is a large scholarly literature on everything from portion size, to fast food availability, to how we eat (constant snacking, eating on the run or in your car), and how much we eat (a lot), and you will find many studies demonstrating the ways in which the modern eating environment undermines our health and waistlines. But you already know that. The point is that the new normal food environment makes changing our eating patterns, portions, and passions very difficult to thwart.

Finally, there is our innate biology.We did not evolve in a landscape of Starbucks and MacDonalds. Rather, until relatively recently having enough food to eat was a rare luxury, and there are still societies where famine is a real and present danger. Because we may have to go for days or more without sufficient sustenance, when we encounter calorie-dense foodsthe best kinds are fatty, and carbohydrates-- the best form of easy energy, our biology dictates that we eat as much as we can so that we can survive to find the next meal. We are programmed to love fatty, high carbohydrate foods. To counteract these impulses is to work against millions of years of evolution.

Our food habits rewire our neural circuits for pleasure and reward, our food environment reinforces our food habits, and our innate biological motivations shape our enabling food environments. So, yes, we are stupid to think that intoning a promise to eat less rich, alluring food when faced with such huge obstacles will be successful. But we are not stupid to keep on trying, because each attempt teaches us about ourselves and potentially one step closer to a better relationship with food. The key is to realize that atthe heart of both our good and bad eating behaviors is the motivation to survive and experience pleasure, which is smart indeed.

Originally posted here:
Are We Stupid to Make Dieting a New Years Resolution? - Psychology Today

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Home » Diets that Work » Are We Stupid to Make Dieting a New Years Resolution? – Psychology Today