When we go on a diet, this usually means that we restrict ourselves in some way. Whether that’s by skipping meals, restricting the overall number of calories consumed in a day or cutting out certain foods or food groups.
The problem is that whilst our minds know that this this is something we are INTENTIONALLY doing … our bodies DO NOT know this! Our bodies sense the diet as a sign that there isn’t enough food available for it to get the energy or nutrition it needs.
Your body, unfortunately, does not know that you live in a world where food is literally available at the touch of a button…and that anytime you choose to eat you can (this being dependent of course on whether you are fortunate enough to have the resources needed to be able to access food).
When the body perceives this sign that there isn’t enough food available…what happens?
Well its primary goal is to keep you alive. So to do this, it triggers a series of physiological changes that cascade out throughout the body.
We will talk about exactly what happens in a minute, but to understand why our bodies react this way, it can first be useful to take a look at how we as human beings evolved.
We evolved from cavepeople. Cave men and women had to scavenge and hunt for hours and days at a time to get all the food and nutrition they needed.
If you were a cave person you HAD to eat as much food as you possibly could whenever it was available (for example in the months when there were lots of leaves and berries to be foraged, or just after a big beast had been caught) because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have stored any excess energy as fat…and there was a good chance you wouldn’t have survived the long cold winter months when there was nothing available to eat.
The cave people who did survive were the ones with the strongest instinct to eat as much…and preferably as high calorie foods as they could, when they were available.
Those who had this instinct were the ones who survived long enough to have cave people babies and passed their genes on to the next generations.
And guess what? We have inherited this primitive instinct from our cavepeople ancestors and it is still very much present in our brains and bodies today.
So lets come back to the present moment.
You go on a diet, your body senses it is not getting enough food and it panics. It thinks “uhoh, im not getting enough food its time to start protecting myself” and it does this by going into something that we are going to refer to as “starvation mode”.
In ‘starvation mode’ your body activates a series of chemical and hormonal changes which are designed to stop you from losing so much weight that you eventually disappear.
Here are some of the changes that happen:
- Your metabolism slows down.
Metabolism is the rate at which your body burns energy. By slowing down your metabolism you use less energy less quickly and can store more of the energy you consume as fat
- Your hormones change.
When your body senses that it isn’t getting enough food it responds by increasing the level of our hunger hormone (ghrelin) which circulates around the body. This makes you feel hungrier than usual (ever noticed that happening when you go on a diet)? This makes total sense when we think about our evolution – this response is designed to get you up out of your seat and motivated to go out to find food.
- Our senses of smell and taste become heightened and food becomes more rewarding.
There is some research which has shown that food actually smells and tastes better when we are on a diet!
- We start to experience strong cravings
Again, designed to get us up and out of our seats searching for the food we need to survive.
It is common when we are on a diet to respond to these thoughts by trying to distract ourselves, ignore them or push them away, but unfortunately our minds just don’t work like this and this can actually have the opposite effect!
Each of these changes come together and make it incredibly difficult for a human being living in a society with abundant food availability to stay on a self-inflicted diet over any prolonged period of time.
And just like with any other basic biological human need (think needing the toilet or holding your breath) eventually our biology wins.
No amount of will power is strong enough to override our primitive biological drives and eventually… we eat!
Because of the restriction our bodies experience, this eating can happen in ways that lead to people feeling addicted to or out of control around food.
How does all of this fit with your experiences?
Our video on The Diet Cycle takes a deeper look at how we can get caught up in yoyo cycles and the impact this can have on our health.
The Curvy Wellness Company 