Diets, Healthy Eating, Will Power, Exersise and a Podcast to listen to!
As followers of this blog will know I have been following a healthy eating programme and trying to exercise every day. I haven't been too restrictive of my diet as firstly I love my food and I don't want to give up loads of nice things and secondly I totally believe that diets don't work.
By diets I mean all those fad diets like the Cambridge diet and the cabbage diet and only having 1000 calories a day and any restriction of your diet that just makes you feel hungry a lot of the time and miserable and craving a piece of cake or a biscuit or some cheese! By not working I mean obviously while you stick to them you loose weight but once you have lost the weight and go back to your normal eating habits you put all the weight back on again and quite often a bit more too. The majority of people who do these diets do not then take up a proper healthy eating lifestyle along with some daily exercise and so are in a life long cycle of feeling too big, dieting, loosing weight, eating normally again, putting weight back on, feeling too big etc.
I am a strong believer in exercise really helping to maintain health and a decent level of fitness and although it can certainly help a lot to loose weight you can still be a larger person and be fitter and healthier than a slimmer person who does no exercise.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I listened to a recent podcast from Inquiring Minds called The Science of Weight Loss featuring Traci Mann, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and author of the new book Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again.
Traci has done a huge amount of research and comes up with the same belief as I hold, diets don't work and exercise does! She also explores the topic of will power and how people are quick to judge someone large saying they have no will power with regards food.
Her opinion is that quite a lot of larger people have a lot of will power but the trouble is that if you resist a biscuit 20 times during the day and then eat it, you mess up a whole days worth of will power as those calories get added on. In most other areas of life if you show will power 20 times out of 21 there are no bad consequences. For example if I use will power to make myself exercise 20 times over 20 days and then on one day I don't do it wont actually make that much difference, the next day I'll go back to exercising and will still see the health benefits and the weightloss. If I practice Spanish 20 times but then don't bother on the 21st time and go on Facebook instead it wont matter, I will still have learnt words that cannot be undone. Will power over food is so very unforgiving!
So despite there being various different opinions out there what Traci said really made a lot of sense to me and reinforced my own beliefs. It is fascinating listening for anyone interested in the subject.
You can download the podcast from Soundcloud HERE.
On a more personal note, after recovering from injury I am now doing better than ever with the power walking despite a couple of blisters on the soles of my feet. The last couple of walks I have walked for an hour and walked at around fifteen and a half minutes per mile :)
Thanks for looking :) xxx
By diets I mean all those fad diets like the Cambridge diet and the cabbage diet and only having 1000 calories a day and any restriction of your diet that just makes you feel hungry a lot of the time and miserable and craving a piece of cake or a biscuit or some cheese! By not working I mean obviously while you stick to them you loose weight but once you have lost the weight and go back to your normal eating habits you put all the weight back on again and quite often a bit more too. The majority of people who do these diets do not then take up a proper healthy eating lifestyle along with some daily exercise and so are in a life long cycle of feeling too big, dieting, loosing weight, eating normally again, putting weight back on, feeling too big etc.
I am a strong believer in exercise really helping to maintain health and a decent level of fitness and although it can certainly help a lot to loose weight you can still be a larger person and be fitter and healthier than a slimmer person who does no exercise.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I listened to a recent podcast from Inquiring Minds called The Science of Weight Loss featuring Traci Mann, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and author of the new book Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again.
Traci has done a huge amount of research and comes up with the same belief as I hold, diets don't work and exercise does! She also explores the topic of will power and how people are quick to judge someone large saying they have no will power with regards food.
Her opinion is that quite a lot of larger people have a lot of will power but the trouble is that if you resist a biscuit 20 times during the day and then eat it, you mess up a whole days worth of will power as those calories get added on. In most other areas of life if you show will power 20 times out of 21 there are no bad consequences. For example if I use will power to make myself exercise 20 times over 20 days and then on one day I don't do it wont actually make that much difference, the next day I'll go back to exercising and will still see the health benefits and the weightloss. If I practice Spanish 20 times but then don't bother on the 21st time and go on Facebook instead it wont matter, I will still have learnt words that cannot be undone. Will power over food is so very unforgiving!
So despite there being various different opinions out there what Traci said really made a lot of sense to me and reinforced my own beliefs. It is fascinating listening for anyone interested in the subject.
You can download the podcast from Soundcloud HERE.
On a more personal note, after recovering from injury I am now doing better than ever with the power walking despite a couple of blisters on the soles of my feet. The last couple of walks I have walked for an hour and walked at around fifteen and a half minutes per mile :)
Thanks for looking :) xxx
Comments