Plus how a process called ‘slow dieting’ can keep the kilos off for good.
Leading obesity researcher Dr Fuller shares his theory on slow dieting and successful interval weight management.
Have you ever started a new diet just to yo-yo back to your old weight (plus a few more kilos)?
Dr Nick Fuller is a leading obesity researcher from the University of Sydney and this is a phenomenon he’s been studying.
Speaking on Body+Soul’s daily podcast Healthy-ish, Dr Fuller explains why he *literally* wrote a book on it (called Interval Weight Loss for Women) and how we can use ‘slow dieting’ techniques for lasting success.
What is slow dieting? We hear you ask?
“Slow dieting is hopefully what we’re going to be talking about now for decades to come, because what we’ve been doing for decades, since the 1970s, hasn’t worked. And if anything, dieting is contributing to the obesity epidemic,” he tells host Felicity Harley on the Healthy-ish episode Is slow dieting the secret to weight loss?
“There is a lot of research to show now that dieting is actually accelerating a person’s weight gain and putting them or leaving them in a worse off position.”
Dieting is bad for you?!?
So no – slow dieting isn’t what you’ve been doing now and it also isn’t going to mean waiting years (even though it might sound like it). Slow dieting is about hacking the body’s natural protective mechanisms that prevent a dramatic weight loss process.
“When we go about a weight loss journey, what we’re typically doing is signing up to a diet or a 4, 8 or 12 week programme. These cute, neatly packaged products, they look great. They’re usually very easy to follow because they’re telling us how many calories to eat, you know, with a strict military exercise, programmes to follow,” Dr Fuller explains.
Of course, eating less and burning more energy will lose weight, but around the 8-12 week mark the body goes into shutdown and starts to claw back to its ‘set point’, which Dr Fuller describes as the average number on the scales your body stays at.
For some people it’s more kilos and for others it’s less, even though they may eat the same amount. Hence those leaner friends you may have who can often be seen bingeing on fries without ever gaining weight.
“Your body’s so good at shutting down and it’s programmed to a set weight. It will always protect that weight, will always go back to its set point. But not only that, it will add extra ‘plus GST’ [kilos] because it learns to prepare for the next bout of starvation and has to survive,” he explains.
Don’t put your body in starvation mode!
So – when you ‘fall off your bandwagon’ it’s probably because your body is literally making you.
“It’s our metabolism, our appetite, hormones changing, telling us to eat more. And sure, some of the old habits creep back in because we’ve been abstaining from all those favourite foods or cutting out certain food groups or we get injured from the exercise programme we’ve been following,” Dr Fuller adds.
If you’re wondering how slow dieting gets around this, it’s by basically running a shorter dieting circuit with breaks in the middle. This way of eating doesn’t give your body enough time to go into diet sabotaging mode (i.e. when you eat the whole container of Ben & Jerry’s).
“We want to switch off the body’s response to weight loss. So what we’ve found through our research at the University of Sydney is that when you get a person to lose weight in four week cycles (so you’re losing about a couple of kilos over the course of four weeks) it’s very easy to achieve, he explains.
We’re talking 0.5kgs a week, but instead of carrying it on, you need to have a break in the second month.
“You have to maintain your weight from the month before. Then you go on and lose weight again during the third month and then maintain, lose, maintain like a stepdown pyramid approach.”
“You switch off that usual response, that ‘biology’, that’s resulting in you failing your dieting attempts and most importantly, prescribing you a dietary plan, exercise plan, sleep routine that’s easy and sustainable (because a lot of these approaches that we’re adopting [at the moment], we just can’t stick to them).”