Tag: Nutrition

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Why Diets Don’t Work

Yo-yo dieting is exhausting (I should know- I started when I was 13 and didn’t stop for well over a decade). 

As isolating as those years of counting calories and restricting carbohydrates were, I now know I was not alone in my battle with disordered eating. As a registered dietitian, women from all walks of life have shared their struggles around food, dieting, and body image with me on a regular basis.

Kendra, a 42 year old stay at home mom, has been trying to diet off the same 10 pounds since she had her second baby in 2012. She can’t remember the last time she ate a slice of pizza and didn’t worry about it ruining her progress.

Lucy eats clean all day- no bread, no dairy, and certainly no sugar. At night, she binge eats saltine crackers dipped in peanut butter, oatmeal smothered with dark chocolate chips, and shredded cheese melted on tortilla chips. She believes she needs more discipline, but I say she needs less restrictions.

Nellie lost 30 lbs doing keto. She gained 35 of them back. She tried keto again but now, it’s not working. She feels confused and frustrated at her body.

So why don’t extreme diets work? There are a few reasons…

  1. Diers are often cookie-cutter. Most diets are one-size-fits-all, which doesn’t align with the fact that we are all individuals with different genetics, lifestyles, body compositions, and personal preferences. I can’t tell you how many perimenopausal moms tell me they “failed” following the meal plan a 22 year old trainer dude made them. They didn’t fail, they just needed an approach that took their age, hormones, and lifestyle into account.
  1. Diets are unsustainable. Many diets are businesses, and they’re trying to get participants’ results quickly. To do so, they require them to eat very few calories and carbs, or they restrict major food groups. Once the diet ends, the dieter returns to normal eating and bam, regains all the weight. 
  1. Restriction sucks. After a few weeks of “willpower,” most dieters find themselves sneaking any off-limit foods set by the diet. Whether the plan deprives the participants of sugar, bread, pasta, chips, or cheese, it usually ends with a binge and feelings of guilt. 

Not to mention, extreme diets don’t teach you how to eat for regular life (but they do train you to fear food and distrust your body). What’s the point of starting if you can’t stick to it for the long haul?

As tempting as extreme approaches and quick fixes may sound, you have to stop dieting if you want to stand a chance at getting results that last and improve your relationship with food.

In my book How to Eat Like A Normal Person: A Guide to Overcoming the All-or-Nothing Mindset with Food & Diet, I’ll teach you how to adopt a balanced and nutritious approach to eating. Through six stories of my real life clients, I’ll share the eating and mindset strategies that helped them find peace with food and feel confident in both their body and choices. You won’t get a list of foods to avoid or restrict. Rather, you’ll learn what to eat more of so you feel more in control of food.

After reading How to Eat Like A Normal Person, you’ll never have to diet again!

Written by Kait Richardson, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and author of How to Eat Like A Normal Person: Guide to Overcoming the “All-or-Nothing” Mindset with Food & Diet. You can follow her on Instagram @kaitrichardsonrd.

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Release Day: How to Eat Like a Normal Person

We are excited for the release of How to Eat Like a Normal Person by Kait Richardson, RDN, LD!

This is not a diet book because let’s face it: the last thing you need is another list of foods to avoid, rules to follow, or pills to take to “boost your metabolism” (Psst, they don’t exist).

Diets that guilt you for eating fruit and tell you to skip breakfast for the sake of weight loss say they’re healthy when in reality, they’re disordered. Rather, this book is a collection of stories and strategies to teach you how to eat like a normal person, and restrictive dieting is anything but normal. There is no single body type nor metabolism.

As a registered dietitian and ex yo-yo dieter, Kait Richardson knows first-hand that too many rules around food lead to anxiety, binge eating, poor body image, and distressing health outcomes. They create dysfunction around hunger cues and often leave you in a worse place than where you started (mentally and physically). Plus, diets teach you nothing about how to fuel YOUR unique body!

How to Eat Like a Normal Person will guide you through the journeys of six women who struggle with obsessive dieting. This book provides applicable tools and journal prompts to help women go from an all-or-nothing mentality to finding balance and peace with their diets. The strategies in this book are designed for:

  • Yo-yo dieters
  • Perfectionists
  • Emotional eaters
  • Binge eaters
  • And women overwhelmed by the conflicting diet information out there!

If you want to feel confident in your skin, boost your energy, and experience control around food for the first time in your life, How to Eat Like a Normal Person will forever transform how you think about food. After applying the strategies in this interactive workbook, you will never need another diet again!You can order this book  in all formats directly from our 4HP Website and receive 10% OFF using coupon code 4HP10!

How to Eat Like a Normal Person
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The Secret to Stop Binge Eating

What if I told you the secret to stop binge eating was to eat more?

Binge eaters, picture this: you start your work day off committed to eating 1300 calories. For breakfast, you choke down bland egg whites and a chalky protein shake. By the time it’s 10 am, your tummy grumbles. Rather than eating, you suppress your hunger with black coffee until noon.

In your lunch box is a green salad with two-day old chicken, a low-fat vinaigrette, and exactly ⅛ cup of shredded carrots. Begrudgingly, you stab your fork into the bowl of leaves while your colleague enjoys a thick, overstuffed hummus wrap. You salivate as you watch chunks of feta tumble out from the tortilla and obsess whether or not cheese would be OK to add to your salad.

After returning to your desk unsatisfied, you remember the granola bar stashed in your desk drawer. Feeling guilty about the 11 grams of added sugar, you devour it while swearing you’ll skip carbs at dinner.

Just one problem: you’re still hungry. The rest of your afternoon is clouded by thoughts of food, making it hard to concentrate on work. Your body and brain are begging for nourishment but your calorie counting app says no. You feel bad for wanting food.

But by the time you get home, it’s game over. At a long stoplight, you caved and ordered an XL pizza off UberEats. But even the 12 minute arrival time does not stop you from tearing into your pantry like a grizzly bear at an abandoned campsite. You munch on trail mix, a handful of stale crackers, and even some chocolate chips you hid from yourself in the back of the freezer. At this point, there’s no point in counting calories- the day is ruined by your binge. Your stomach is uncomfortably full, and you feel an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame. Tomorrow, you say to yourself, I will do better.

The thing is, tomorrow won’t be better if you continue to restrict food to unhealthy levels. This is because the body’s normal and healthy response to starvation is to seek out large amounts of quick energy in the form of sugar, fat, and ultra-processed foods. Why? To keep you alive! Read How to Eat like a Normal Person to understand the binge-eating pattern.

Unless you have anorexia nervosa, an extreme eating disorder with the highest death rate of all mental health disorders, your body will drive you to seek out food when it is not getting enough nutrition. This explains why women who struggle with the all-or-nothing mentality with food often ping-pong between diets and binging- their bodies are recovering from mild starvation by overeating. 

In fact, studies show adopting a regular eating pattern has been shown to reduce the frequency of binge eating while suppressing hunger can increase the occurrence of binge eating. This means to stop binge eating, you must fuel your body throughout the day with the right balance of protein, complex carbs, and dietary fats.

Feel confused or overwhelmed by the idea of eating more to binge less? How to Eat Like A Normal Person: Guide to Overcoming the “All-or-Nothing” Mindset with Food & Diet is a story-workbook that will teach you how to eat for YOUR body so you stop binge eating and heal your relationship to food.

Written by Kait Richardson, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and author of How to Eat Like A Normal Person: Guide to Overcoming the “All-or-Nothing” Mindset with Food & Diet. You can follow her on Instagram @kaitrichardsonrd.

Pre-order your copy here.

How to Eat Like a Normal Person