Speaker 1: 0:37

The silliest diet I ever did, oh, my goodness. And I did a lot of silly diets, but I think the silliest was the cabbage soup diet. Maybe you've tried it hopefully not, but if you did, you'd know that on one day you'd eat milk and bananas and then the other day you'd eat another weird food combination, and I remember my mom had to drop off these foods to me at school just because they were so bizarre. I mean, all diets suck, but some, I think, are particularly bad, which is what I want to talk about today, focusing on the ones that I think are the worst and those diets that I think are most likely to lead to binge eating, feeling out of control around food, and can really mess with your relationship with food in the long term. Now, if you struggle with consistency, please avoid all diets, but particularly I want you to be aware of these and avoid these. If you haven't listened to no Wellness Weight Group before, then welcome.

Speaker 1: 1:33

My name's Lindy Cohen. I'm a dietician and nutritionist and I've helped thousands and honestly, probably thousands of people feel normal and relaxed around food. This podcast is all about giving you the science, the information, the things you actually need because, oh my goodness, you've been inundated with dodgy diet advice your entire life, so much so that it's really hard for you to now know what in the world you are allowed to eat. So this podcast is giving you all the right information, speaking to experts who can reveal some really important insights to change the way you think about food. Plus, you'll hear from me and real people who are also going through a relationship with food transformation, like you also are Starting off strong with the ketogenic diet, which is all the craze at the moment. Now, if you don't know what that is, this diet requires you to have about 70 to 75% of your energy intake from fat so exceptionally high fat. 20 to 25% protein and then only 5 to 10% carbs, and the point of this is for your body to start using ketone bodies as fuel instead of glucose from carbs. Now, if you don't really know that 5% to 10% of carbs is exceptionally low, it really just allows space for things. Like you know, there might be some naturally occurring carbohydrate in something like tomatoes, and you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're worrying about the carbohydrates in something like tomatoes, and you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're worrying about the carbohydrates in something like tomatoes, which really tomatoes just don't have that much carbs anyway.

Speaker 1: 3:08

Now a state of ketosis. It can take a few days to a week to be able to get to, and it can result in a whole bunch of very, very unpleasant symptoms like feeling intense hunger, fatigue, nausea, bad breath, brain fog and really bad headaches. I know people who have tried this. They also report feeling like they're really bad company during these days and fundamentally, it's not sustainable. The thing I think is the most sinister of all diets that are negative are the ones that are going to tell you that entire food groups are forbidden and bad. Now majority of people end up binge eating on carbohydrate-based foods because these are the things we've been told we need to cut out of our diet for our entire life, and that's just not the case. I do have another episode on this very topic about why carbohydrates do not need to be cut out of your diet if you do want to lose weight. So go ahead and have a listen to that episode if you want.

Speaker 1: 4:02

An interesting thing about the ketogenic diet is that it was originally developed to help kids with epilepsy and it's only now been adopted as a weight loss diet, and it's really fascinating. It's a brilliant diet. It helps a lot of people who need it, but it is wildly hard to maintain and stick to. In fact, you can't actually stay in a state of ketosis for the rest of your life because it's incredibly unhealthy to do so, and so I think what I really dislike about the ketogenic diet is how it limits so many foods and so many essential nutrients. It even limits things like vegetables and the amount you can eat. You certainly aren't even allowed to have things like fruit. Now, anytime you get a diet that's telling you you're not allowed to have fruit and vegetables, I mean, come on, I want alarm bells to go off in your brain and, as I always say, you have to ask yourself the question can I do this for the rest of your life? I could never stick to keto for the rest of my life.

Speaker 1: 4:59

I think it promotes an obsession with counting grams of carbohydrates per day meticulously, because that's what you need to do, and it doesn't consider the full nutritional benefit of food. So like there's an emphasis on things like cream and bacon and cheese, and you know, as I said, the limit on vegetables and fruit. Sometimes, using a little bit of common sense, you go. You know, I just don't think I could live like that forever, and that's the thing we need to always consider, because if you can't live on it forever, then when you stop sticking to the diet, what's going to happen to the weight that you lost? You will likely regain it, and statistically we know people will regain more weight than they did before ketogenic diet. So, unless you want to gain weight, I would highly recommend avoiding something like the ketogenic diet, which is also particularly hard to do if you are socializing, if you like, seeing people and eating out like most of us do. Plus, there is increasing evidence that suggests it is actually unsafe to follow in the long term.

Speaker 1: 5:56

To stay in that state of ketosis is not sustainable. It can reduce bone mineral content. Now, if you're someone who has osteoporosis in the family and a quarter of Australian women have osteoporosis then I think this is particularly interesting. Plus, there might be some concerns for your kidney function, and that just makes sense when you consider the intense macronutrient imbalance that you're creating on a diet like this. So the weight loss that you might get on ketogenic diet is not sustainable. And now you've cut out carbohydrates. Once you do reintroduce them into your diet. You're probably going to binge eat on them because you feel so deprived, so please give keto a mix. I know maybe your neighbor she's just lost a lot of weight doing the ketogenic diet, or maybe your friend from gym has done the same. I just want you to breathe and decide that it's nice to watch what's happening for them, but maybe in a year, two years from now, I want you to be curious about what might happen to their health and their body as a result of doing something like keto diet.

Speaker 1: 6:58

There's also the raw food diet, which is a bit of an oldie, but it's still quite popular, and I think this is restrictive in its very nature. It says that you're only allowed to have foods that have never been cooked, so no processed or no refined foods. It claims that cooking destroys the nutrients and the natural enzymes that are found in food. However, this is ridiculous, because cooking can often actually increase the benefit of our foods and it makes the nutrients found in our food more easily absorbed by our bodies. In fact, when you look at the history of humankind, when we evolved to build fire and we can finally start cooking food, the life expectancy soared for our people because suddenly we could access so many more nutrients. Babies survived much more. We all just thrived as a people. So that is absolute nonsense what this raw food diet does.

Speaker 1: 7:50

Because it restricts you so much, it often results in you not eating enough calories, which can be very dangerous. It can lead to nutrient deficiencies and the disordered eating habits that you know I'm trying to stamp out. It is extremely restrictive, and don't let anyone tell you that it is not. Plus, it's demonizing this idea that processed foods are all bad. That's just not the case. There are so many processed foods in my pantry and in my kitchen that actually make healthy eating so much easier. So, whether or not it's something like tofu or milk, or maybe it's something like tofu or milk, or maybe it's something like some cheese, I love having these foods on hand and they are easy to have and include in your diet.

Speaker 1: 8:30

Plus, let's talk about the fact that it becomes really hard to get enough things like, for example, protein, because you couldn't have something like cottage cheese, you can't have normal cheese, you can't have tinned tuna, you can't have normal cheese, you can't have tinned tuna, you can't have cooked chicken. All these things are not allowed, and so you end up eating a very high fat diet. You eat quite a bit of fruits. Not that fruit's bad, but it's just an imbalance, and imbalances are never good news for your health. And I will finish with saying that the research agrees with me. It says, no, don't do the raw food diet. Well, what the research is pointing out is that we have problems with bone density of people who stick to diets like this, and this could be because calcium is perhaps a bit more hard to get I don't actually know why and also people getting menstrual irregularity, and this could be because they're not eating enough calories throughout the day.

Speaker 1: 9:22

Now, leaning right onto this, another diet I really want you to avoid is the low calorie diet, and that generally means you're eating less than 1200 calories a day, or even if it's 1500 calories a day, I want you to tell you that that is how many calories a toddler needs. That is not how many calories an adult needs to survive and thrive. What a low calorie diet does is it slows your metabolism and it doesn't actually achieve long-term success. I bet you've tried loads of low calorie diets and you know better than anyone that they are unsustainable. Sure, you may have lost weight on them in the past and you think about anything like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig and all those kinds of those companies. They use a low calorie diet format to try and curb how much you're eating and tends to result in disordered eating. When we are restricting our calories like that, it can cause us to end up binge eating or emotional eating. It may end up making the problem so much worse than it actually helps to fix it.

Speaker 1: 10:20

Now, what is the common theme between all these diets? Well, they're all restrictive, they're all cutting out entire food groups or foods and, fundamentally, they're unsustainable in the long term. You could not answer the question can I stick to this for the rest of my life? You probably couldn't. Now people sometimes ask me what about something like intermittent fasting? And I say if you really enjoy something like that and you think you could do it forever, I don't have a problem with that.

Speaker 1: 10:44

My issue, my gripe, is with these diets that are fundamentally unsustainable and that do not give you consistency, and particularly the ones that are actually messing with your health and calling it wellbeing because you're losing weight. Each time you go on a failed diet attempt, your metabolism will slow. It'll change your hunger hormones, making an increase in how hungry you feel, increasing cravings for the very foods that you are trying to avoid. Typically, we get that weight rebound as your body is fighting back, saying I don't want to lose weight, I don't want to be restricted. Remember, your body loves being in a state of homeostasis.

Speaker 1: 11:19

Now, if you're going, okay, cool. Now what do I do, though? A very good place to start is by reading my book. Your Weight Is Not the Problem. If you have not read it, please go ahead and read it. I'll leave some details about it in the description so you can go have a read or have a listen. Now. I hope today's episode has given you a little bit of a nudge not to go on whatever diet you've been mulling about doing and keep asking yourself that question Can I do this for the rest of your life? Because health and well-being, especially for you, should be sustainable, enjoyable, and I think that's a recipe for well-being. Bye.