Joyful Movement
In the Non-diet approach "exercise" is called different things. One of the names I love is "Joyful Movement". This encapsulates the idea that we can find activities that we love, that make our bodies feel alive, energised, vital. Often people feel that to lose weight they must exercise, do XXX calories per day at the gym, coupled with restricting food calories. But in most cases these regimes leave them feeling exhausted, depleted and demotivated because all their hard work is not translating to weight loss on the scales.
Many clients say to me - "I'm eating XX calories and exercising XX hours per day, yet haven't lost weight (or have only lost XX kgs)" or "I regained it straight away once I went on holidays/ over the weekend when I had family over/went back to normal eating...
This is because the bodies natural response to severe restriction of calories is to go into starvation mode - that is - to slow down all bodily process to conserve energy.
Hair stops growing, finger nails stop growing, you won't make neurotransmitters so you won't be in a good mood, your energy will be low because your body will give the little energy you have to keeping your heart muscle pumping (after all - we want it to keep pumping and it goes non-stop regardless of us choosing what activities we do. i.e. We can choose to walk around, but we may not have much energy for our leg muscles to walk around - yet our heart still has to keep pumping - our body will direct energy to our heart preferentially and not to our leg muscles).
Our brain needs a constant supply of glucose (around 120g per day just to function), so if we don't get this from the diet, we will start to make glucose - but we make glucose from protein, and we usually make glucose from stored muscle. We can only eat so much protein per day, so weight loss often comes from muscle loss - which really is the last thing we want to lose, because after we break the diet we now have less muscle (AKA, metabolically active tissue or, the tissue in our body that burns energy), so we end up having a slower metabolic rate. It is one of the main reasons we put on weight quickly after the end of a diet (and often more).
Severe calorie restriction sends messages to our thyroid that we are in "starvation" so we start producing less thyroid hormone - slowing down our metabolic rate as well - we may not end up with clinical hypothyroidism, but we definitely slow down our thyroids. This completely makes sense from a survival perspective - through the ages we've experienced so many famines and as a species we would have been wiped out had we not been able to slow down our metabolisms somehow. It's just not helpful for us now!
The non-diet approach is an approach that teaches normalised eating. It is definitely supportive of weight loss - but in a gentle, realistic and sustainable way.
Sadly the biggest risk factor for developing an eating disorder is dieting, and the most common eating disorder is Binge Eating Disorder. At the heart of Binge Eating Disorder lies dietary restriction. I truly believe that if we are going to seriously, genuinely and compassionately help people with weight issues (that may also include eating disorders) we need to be honest about a number of things:
* Weight stigma in our society
* Acknowledge our own weight biases
* really understand that dieting is detrimental - no matter how you look at a diet - whether it be fasting, restricting a food group, cutting out whole food groups, limiting foods after certain times, counting calories/points/macronutrients.... A diet is a diet is a diet...!!
* start to think about the problem differently (Einstein: definition of insanity - "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results")