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Renaissance
Woman
D r. J e n n i f e r C a s e , D r. M e l i s s a D a v i s & D r. M i k e I s r a e t e l
P. 1 3 7
05
The Psychology
of Dieting
Success at both dieting and sports performance is very dependent on a good
mind set. Perspective and psychological habits can profoundly affect success
in any endeavor.This chapter will outline the design of a successful diet from
a psychological perspective, to help you increase your chances of getting the
results you want from the diet you have designed using the earlier chapters.
If dieting was all about the physiology of eating and training, we could stop this
book right here. You could simply eat for your goals like a machine and fitness
would be just around the corner. Fortunately or unfortunately, human beings
are not robots. We are not only physiologically complex, but psychologically
complex as well. Psychological differences between people, and even differences
in mental state within the same person over different periods of time can have
a great impact on their dieting success. While we’re busy learning about the
physiological details of successful performance and fat loss dieting, we had better
take a good look at the psychological side as well.
Within this chapter, we will outline the design of a successful diet from a
psychological perspective, to help you increase your chances of getting the results
you want from the diet you have designed using the earlier chapters.
A long term goal can mean many things, but to be sure “I have no idea” is not one
of them. Long term goals can include:
We could plan longer than a year at a time, but then we risk taking our “goal”
and turning it into more of a “wish.” If we plan too far ahead, we’re left with “just
train eat and keep getting better” as our plan, which isn’t really a plan at all and
something we were going to do anyway. It’s our sincere advice to you to keep
most of your goals within the one-year time horizon. And hey, if you achieve
those goals, you can plan your next year accordingly.
What happens if you don’t have a clear goal? There are 4 negative possibilities
that come to mind:
a. L o s s o f mot i va t i o n
When you have no goal and times get tough in the gym or on the diet, what do
you tell yourself? Well, we’re not sure, which is one of the reasons we recommend
having a goal! It’s tough to cheat on your diet with that piece of cheesecake if
you’ve got a meet coming up for which you’re on track to make a weightclass. It’s
unlikely that you’re going to stand in front of figure judges and know that you
could have looked better had you not fallen off the wagon multiple times during
the diet.
There will be many times on a tough diet during which you will ask yourself
“why am I even doing this?” Your long term goal is the answer to that question
and has a very big effect on your motivation and consistency. If you have no
answer to that question and your goal is “just trying to lean out a bit” (which
is not remotely clear), having that extra piece of cake you know you shouldn’t
doesn’t seem like such a big deal, so you wind up derailing any progress towards
your vague goal.
While many women find the process of fat and weight loss rewarding and
motivating in and of itself, many of those same women struggle mightily with
attempts at gaining muscle. The uptick of the scale, the increase in dress size
and the disappearance of your favorite muscle definition can wreak havoc on
motivation for muscle gain. When gaining weight, many females are fighting
one or more of the following - their personal preferences for appearance, most of
society’s norms (often reflected in the mildly rude comments from grandparents or
b. L o s i ng a s e ns e o f t im e -to -ta rg et
If your long-term goal has been to lose 50lbs and you’re down 25, you’re halfway
there! Yay! Blow up the balloons and invite the clowns; it’s you’re ‘halfway-there’
party! Comparatively, if your long-term goal barely exists, or is the ill-defined
“I’d like to get leaner,” how do you even remotely know where you are in the
process? If you don’t even know how long your journey will take, you might
find yourself pretty disparaged and under-motivated. (Think back a situation like
this in some cardio class you might have taken…..if you are told to do 25 sit ups,
you have a definite end point and can probably blast through 25 - no problem. If,
however, the instructor just yells “Do sit ups until I say stop!”, you might take a
break after 15; you have no idea if the end is in sight or how much to conserve or
exert energy in order to make it to the unknown end.)
Knowing how far you’ve come and how much further you have to go can allow
you to prepare for reality, expend your psychological energy wisely, and push
hard when you know the goal is close (and save the hard pushes for later if the
goal is still further away). Successful dieters don’t cheat a week out from their
bikini show, and they don’t cut out all the fun foods on week 1 of 16 in their
If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve arrived?
Do Olympic sprinters continue to run past the finish line, Forrest-Gump-Style,
around the track until officials restrain them? Of course not, because they know
that celebration of their victory and planning for the next race begin right as soon
as they cross that line. And in a big sense, your long term goal is that finish line.
If we don’t diet to enjoy at least the results, then why the hell do we diet at all? If
you don’t have a long term goal, when is your party? Never? When you finally
give up and break down? What kind of party is that? And if you don’t have a goal
to finish, when are you supposed to choose a new goal and make further strides?
Having a clear long term goal, along with progressive mini goals that support
it, will go a long way towards motivating you to succeed. This strategy will
allow you to reward yourself for your accomplishments, hopefully to enjoy them
fully, and to intelligently plan your next goal, even if that next goal is “establish a
healthy and balanced eating pattern at this bodyweight, forever.”
d. P robl e ms wi t h c o n sisten t p ro g ra m m in g
Internet diet and training authority Martin Berkhan once coined a less than-PC,
but phenomenal and hilarious term; “Fuckarounditis.” Martin defined this state of
affairs based on fickleness often seen in lifter/dieters. When someone changes their
focus of training once a week, changes their diet goals once every two to three
weeks, and starts using new exercises they saw someone else recommending on
Facebook the very same day they saw them, that person can be diagnosed with
Fuckarounditis. The problem with this state of affairs is that when you give your
If you have no clear long-term goals for your dieting process, you might end up
switching directions so often that you go nowhere. One week you’re cutting,
and the next week you’re cheating a bit too much and oh well, you might as well
add some muscle by massing. In two weeks, you’re feeling a bit bloated from the
massing so you start cutting again. 4 days into that, your CrossFit competition
comes up, which means you carb load the night before and party the night of, so
there goes your cutting phase.
At the end of that month or so, where are you in terms of progress? Probably
where you started or close to it. But if you began a well programmed fat loss
phase at the start of that same month instead and stuck to it from the get-go, you
could have been down 5-7 pounds already and seeing visible changes in your
appearance along with improvements in your performance.
We don’t recommend having long term goals just because it sounds nice or
because everyone else says so. We recommend them because they work. They
work to make dieting easier, simpler, more straightforward, more effective, and
more rewarding. If you start dieting for either fat loss or muscle gain and you
don’t know why or where you’re headed, or when you need to get there, consider
stopping and thinking it through before you proceed. Ten minutes of planning
can save you months of time and effort.
For example, imagine that your goal was to lose 15lbs in 3 months (long term).
How would you go about making sure you were on track? If you want to be
maximally effective, you cut up the 15lbs into weekly chunks. 15 divided by 12
is 1.25, which is the average amount of weight you’re going to have to lose per
week if you want to reach your longer-term goal of 15lbs in 3 months.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s step out of teenage insecurity and dependence
on a number for our self-worth. You’re a goal-oriented mature adult on a mission.
An adult who understands that athletes move, and this movement requires
muscles. These athletes come in a wide variety of body sizes and shapes, but all
have the similar goals of gaining muscle, losing fat, and improving performance to
different extents. The scale comes to this arrangement only as a tool and nothing
more. If you calmly and logically decided to drop from 155lbs to 140lbs over
3 months to improve your performance and appearance, the scale will help you
tremendously with staying on track for those goals.
If you weigh yourself with no goals or no healthy and stable lifestyle in mind, you
won’t find any magic in the number of protons and neutrons that compose your
body, which is fundamentally what the scale really measures. It tells you little to
nothing about your goals, appearance, health, or performance.
3) Op t i ma l Bo dywe i g h t Ch a n ge Ra t e
How fast or how slow dieters attempt to lose weight during their fat loss phases
seems to impact not just physiology (how much fat they lose and the amount of
muscle they spare), but psychology as well. It turns out that the recommended
weight loss rate we discussed in Chapter 2 is also psychologically beneficial.
From a physiological perspective, there is not too much wrong with losing
weight very slowly. If you’re able to keep very close track of your food intake and
There is, however, a non-physiological problem with such a slow weight loss. It’s
been shown in well-controlled studies that those dieters whom attempt needlessly
slow weigh loss rates (under 0.5% per week and perhaps even as high as under
0.75% per week) experience greater dropout rates and weight re-gain after the
conclusion of the diet. The top hypothesis is that super-slow weight loss rates
are destructive to motivation. Seeing steady noticeable results is a very powerful
motivator, and super slow diets just don’t deliver the goods in that regard.
A very related approach to going super slow is the looser approach of “just eating
healthy.” Eating healthy is fine, but there is no good reason to think that just
healthy eating will result in noticeable and meaningful fat loss. You can eat just
the same number of calories healthy or not, so if your goal is weight loss, you
need a more precise plan.
It seems from both the literature and our extensive work with clients through RP
that most people do best with faster rates of weight loss, between 0.5% and 1%
bodyweight per week. What about the alternative? How does super-fast weight
loss affect psychology?
From a strictly physiological perspective, we can say that weight loss paces past
1% weight loss per week (especially 1.5% and above) are bad news. The caloric
deficit is so great that fatigue skyrockets, training suffers, hunger and cravings
become disproportionately intense, and muscle loss is likely.
Between the extremely slow and the overly aggressive rate is our sort of golden
band of weight loss pace. Weight loss rates between 0.5% and 1% of body mass
per week seem to be not only comfortably within the physiological constraints,
but psychologically sustainable as well. Are they sustainable indefinitely? Not a
chance, which brings us to our next section.
4) Ma i n t e n a n ce P h a s e s
So, we’ve got our optimal dieting pace and we’re good to go, now, let’s start
dieting for a whole year and reach our goals! Wait, wait… we can remember that
in earlier chapters there was mention of a limit to individual stretches of dieting,
especially for fat loss. The limits already mentioned were physiological, but it
turns out there are psychological ones as well.
In addition, the body moves further and further away from its set point. Metabolic
rates fall, requiring even deeper cuts to calories in order to sustain progress. The
brain responds to these trends mostly by raising hunger levels and by dropping
unplanned activity levels. Diet for too long and you’re super hungry and super
lazy, not nearly the kind of environment that sustains fat loss, but most certainly
one that greatly promotes cheating on the diet or worse, ceasing it completely.
After every 2-3 month period of dieting, a maintenance phase can allow the dieter
to not only re-set physiological mechanisms, but psychological ones as well. 2-3
months of maintaining the achieved weight while eating more and more food to
accommodate an increasingly re-accelerating metabolism can be a psychological
godsend to promote recovery from the stresses of dieting and prime the dieter for
another bout of fat loss.
5) T he R i g ht Ti m e fo r B a l a nce
If you’re always dieting or re-establishing your physiology and psychology for
another round of dieting, when is the time for balance? Isn’t there room for eating
the foods you love AND getting the body and performance you want?
There is, but the process is sequential rather than concomitant. FIRST you get
the body you want, and THEN you enjoy the foods you love. To be clearer,
there is quite a bit of enjoyment of the foods you love during each maintenance
phase. We can’t just diet with no end, so periodic maintenance phases are a
temporary return to balance, both physiological and psychological. Do we need
maintenance phases for balance? Can’t we just diet with balance built in?
Taking all of these concepts together, the psychological dieting landscape seems
to have 3 recommended states, with two of them being temporary and one of
them being indefinite in length:
The first psychological state that seems best in the short term is that of focused,
quick (but not too quick), and diligent dieting, whether for fat loss or muscle
gain. This state is very effective for body composition changes, but not sustainable
for periods longer than about 3 months at a time. In addition, diet phases
shorter than about 1 month at a time tend not to accomplish very much body
composition change, especially not when traded off against the restrictions typical
of such a phase. Thus, for psychological and physiological purposes, we typically
recommend diet phases to last between 1 and 3 months.
The second possible state is the maintenance phase. When the focused diet state
comes to its inevitable end, a maintenance phase must be initiated to recover the
individual from the physiological and psychological disruptions of the diet state.
Within 2-3 months (sometimes shorter or longer), the maintenance phase has
returned the dieter back into dieting form, and at that point another focused diet
can occur if needed. This initial phase following a weight change diet requires
more attention to weight than subsequent periods of maintaining when your set
point is established and you can relax a bit in terms of your eating precision.
Once the dieter has achieved the body composition they find at least temporarily
satisfying, they can enter into the third state; balance. The state of balance
(otherwise known as a balanced lifestyle) is really just a maintenance phase
that’s been indefinitely extended. In this state, the dieter continues to eat a
fundamentally healthy and sport-oriented diet. The dieter continues to be
active and train hard, but can also enjoy many of her favorite foods in satisfying
amounts. By eating just a bit less “clean” and continuing to train hard, the dieter
can rely on the body’s proclivity to remain in homeostasis, thus holding a stable
The dieter can remain in this healthy and enriching state of balance for as long as
she chooses, and this is where some big misconceptions about the relationship of
dieting and balanced lifestyles lie…
The key is choice, and the big question to the dieter is “what do you want to do?”
Sit down, relax, and do an honest self- assessment. Think about how you’d like
to look in an ideal world and think about how much you enjoy your balanced
lifestyle of food, friends and fun. Remind yourself that if you are going to diet,
you’ll be giving up a lot of that food and fun for a few months straight. If your
balanced lifestyle is more important than an ideal body, stop self-criticizing
IMMEDIATELY and ENJOY YOUR LIFE; you only have one, and spending it
in a state of purgatory is just no way to live. If you calmly give it some thought
and decide that changing your body is more important than being balanced
for the next 3 months, it’s time to diet - and with no ‘if’s, ‘and’s or ‘but’s. Once
you’re dieting, focus and be diligent, and do what it takes. Commit to those 3
months fully or don’t do it all. Halfhearted dieting does not achieve goals, AND
has the added pain of making you feel guilty. It’s the worst of all scenarios; you
are neither changing your appearance nor enjoying your life! Don’t do this to
yourself. All or nothing is the way to go.
Once you’re done with a bout of dieting, you really must enter the maintenance
phase - none of this “I want to lose 5 more pounds while I’m in maintenance”
crap… that’s not maintenance then, is it? When you’ve been in maintenance
for 2-3 months and your metabolism and psychology have re-set, you’re ready
to make your next decision. Don’t make any decisions on an empty stomach,
If you’re honest with yourself during this decision making process, you’re going
to be both effective at dieting when you need to be, and happy and balanced
when you choose, instead of trying to do it all at once or choosing a different
option every other day. Make decisions and stick to them and you’ll not only be
in great shape, but you’ll be happier too. What’s the point of a great body if you
don’t ever enjoy living in it?