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We believe everyone has the right to love their food and feel proud of how they choose to eat. Join the coaches at Confident Eaters as they share their insights and advice to ditch diet culture and step into your power. They've guided thousands of people out of emotional eating, compulsive overeating, and stressful relationships with food. With science based tools and inspiration, what awaits you? Body confidence, food freedom, and joyful ease with eating.
Why Another Diet is NOT the answer: Q&A with Haylin Alpert
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[00:00:00] Hey there listeners, coach Christina here. Today, we are bringing you an episode that is packed with some really valuable Q and a that comes from one of our friends on the health and fitness industry. Haylin Alpert. Haylin is the owner of Core Principles in Stamford, Connecticut. Core principles is a gym that specializes in helping people who are 55 plus who want to look good, feel great and get fit, even if you hate the gym, if that sounds like you and you're in the Stamford area, then you will definitely want to check them out.
I will link their info in the description of this episode, if you want to find out more. In today's episode, we packed some really great questions from people that Haylin has personally worked with in his gym over the last eight years. You will hear Georgie and Haylin get to the bottom of diets. What is it about diets that make them so uncomfortable and unsatisfying for most people? We will talk about how diets often conflict against the real life that people actually live. We will also [00:01:00] discuss how you can see significant changes in your body and health by focusing mainly on how you eat. Even if you make very few changes to what you eat. And finally, if you are someone who has been on four or more diets and haven't seen much longterm success, but you still think that another different newer, shinier diet is the answer to your challenges, then you won't want to miss the insight that Georgie has.
Let's tune into this conversation now.
Welcome to the Confident Eaters podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We're heading for harmony between your body, food, and feelings. Hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters.
Haylin: All right. I'm gonna fire some questions at Georgie.
Georgie: [00:02:00] Bring it. I'm ready.
Haylin: AnD these questions are mostly formulated from things I've heard.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: With people that I work with or I've heard in general. So, number one. What is it about diets that make them so uncomfortable and unsatisfying for most people?
Georgie: I would say there's two types of uncomfortable and unsatisfied states. And so the more obvious one would be physical. if you decrease your calorie intake slightly, you actually won't feel a whole lot of physical effects. You'll be relatively comfortable. And most of us, we don't eat exactly to our calorie needs every day, but if you're plus or minus a small percentage, you feel quite fine.
But many diets in the name of trying to get you rapid results, put you at a large calorie deficit. And that's when you start to feel physically uncomfortable. So you feel things like hunger in your stomach for many hours of the day. You may feel irritable. You may have trouble sleeping. You may actually feel cold and like you want another sweater or to turn the [00:03:00] thermostat up a lot.
Some people will report getting headaches or shakes or weakness if they're, you know, really gunning it hard. And so a lot of the physical effects just come from too large of a calorie deficit. There's some other things that can happen regarding specific macronutrients. So if somebody does a low carb diet, they can feel pretty terrible physically because their body is adjusting to not having as many carbs in the system.
People get sluggish. If you're an athlete, you may feel like you just don't have your, your top gear can't really liberate energy fast enough if you don't have glucose in your system. And then I guess the other thing that could make you feel really uncomfortable would be if you stop eating fruits and vegetables and you eat lots of fat and meat, you can get really constipated. And that makes everybody really uncomfortable. So, physical discomfort can be attributed to a few things. Now, the, Emotional and psychological [00:04:00] discomfort, I think, is the actual thing that drives most people back to their original eating habits. And I think that's because we're so familiar with the food that we like and it's so personal, and we've often been making the same recipes and eating in the same sort of rituals for decades.
And so if you take that away and say, well, now I want you to eat this food that looks different, smells different, tastes different. We can get somewhat almost homesick for the way that we used to eat. And if I used to like putting ketchup and salt on my food and my diet says you can't put ketchup or salt on your food, then I'm like, it doesn't taste as good as I'm used to a tasting.
So, there's the social aspect. We can be uncomfortable if we have to miss out on sharing food with our friends or our family. Or If we can't go out for a pizza date, you know, with our friends, but it's a very real thing if you, if you did have an active social life going out to eat with people and then you can't do that because of your diet can make you pretty uncomfortable.
Haylin: So are you saying diets [00:05:00] often butt up against the real life that people actually live?
Georgie: Yes. And there's, there's a reason you before the diet was That you were doing things the way you were. Like it was inherently rewarding or it was pleasant or at least it was habitual. And so when the diet comes in and says no, no, no now you eat like this.
There's usually going to be some resistance to it because there was some reason that you were doing things the other way before.
Haylin: Cool.
Georgie: Yeah.
Haylin: That's super clear. It's hard to disagree with any of that. so most diets revolve or focus on what you eat, except for maybe intermittent fasting. What do you suggest folks consider about how we eat? So behavior around food.
Georgie: That's a good question. when it comes to how we eat, some of the, aspects that people can benefit from paying attention to are, am I eating slowly or quickly? That can be one of the most straightforward ones. Because if we eat very quickly, our bodies aren't developing the sense of when we're full in real time.
[00:06:00] So we tend to get over full before we actually feel like we should stop eating. And then after the meal, I feel stuffed or uncomfortably full. So slowing down how you eat can be a really powerful way to begin to change your experience of eating. Not necessarily for the worse, but it's appealing if you don't want to change what you're eating to just think like, maybe if I just eat it more slowly and I can feel satisfied.
A little bit earlier. can be a helpful one. I Often recommend people rehearse, or give it a try, to eat without the distraction of screens the television, or your phone, that sort of thing going on, because there's research that shows when we're distracted, and so we're kind of eating while we're doing other tasks, we don't store the memory as well of how much we've eaten, and We're likely to overeat at that meal because we get distracted from our fullness signals because we're like so into the show, but then we're also likely to eat more at the following meal, even if that's five, six hours [00:07:00] later.
And we're not distracted because part of the way our brains regulate our food intake is by stored memories of how much we ate at the last meal. So if you don't store those memories properly, then you don't compensate for that food that you ate while you were distracted as much at the next meal.
So it can like double bite you in terms of overeating if you eat while you're distracted.
Haylin: Said another way, there's really two parts to this. There's like physical satisfaction, or like physically overeating. And there's also like a psychological component of being satisfied in a meal.
Like if you don't remember, if you don't remember eating a full meal, your body partly thinks you didn't eat the meal, so you want more food later.
Georgie: Yeah, yeah, I mean definitely. Just like we said, the discomfort can be physical and emotional, it's the same. The satisfaction that we have with a meal is physical and it's also emotional.
And we can also completely ignore the physical aspect if we're determined to. It's not very difficult, especially if the food's really good. You can override that physical[00:08:00] I've had enough sensation. And if your, food is from an enjoyment perspective, not satisfying, it's very common to see people want to go find another dessert or something to almost make up for it because they're reliant on their meal to give them a certain amount of pleasure.
Haylin: in your experience, Georgie, have you seen people not really address at all what they eat, but make significant changes to how they eat? And see significant change in their body both weight loss and some of the other benefits that come from
Georgie: Yes, absolutely. Especially if somebody comes to me and their difficulties seem to be mostly emotional eating that's when and I said to a client last night actually it was a assessment with a new client and I said I don't think you and I are going to talk too much about specifics of food because You know, she was telling me, like, I know how to eat, I eat well, my problem is that I get emotional, and that's when I lose control and eat large amounts of food.
And so I was like, we don't need to [00:09:00] talk about the food, the food is not the problem here, we need to talk about emotions and how you're coping with them. So, for many people Yeah, I think without worrying about what they eat, simply looking at how they eat and, and the reasons for their eating or why they eat can make a tremendous difference.
If you ate the same choices of food, but you changed that you only ate when you were hungry, instead of because it's time, that can have a profound impact on people's body weight.
Haylin: aNd similarly, I assume if you don't eat the same things during your meal but Stop when you're satisfied and don't, or said another way, don't overeat that obviously would Have a big impact also.
Georgie: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting because Changing how much we eat is very influential on whether our weight increases or decreases but sometimes we purposely say, okay, I'm going to try and eat less, triggers a reactive, like, no, I want to make sure I get enough, you know, almost like a hoarding mentality that makes us [00:10:00] resistant to eating less.
So I find it's often helpful to come at it somewhat obliquely by looking at why and how you eat and changing those things can just as a side effect, make somebody eat less.
Haylin: That brain is a powerful place.
Georgie: It is.
Haylin: All right. Our last question today if someone has done, let's say four or more diets hasn't had a whole lot of success. And feels like their only choice is to do yet another diet, what would you say to them?
Georgie: That there's other options. There's definitely other options. So, One of the ways that I think You know, kind of defines the methodology of going on a diet Is that it has a start and an end. Even if you tell yourself, I'm gonna do this forever, it's a lifestyle change. It tends to have an end if it had a clear start and the more drastic that change is from how you were eating, say the day before, the more punctuated the end of it's going to [00:11:00] be.
You're going to go on and you're going to go off, but the way that people can do this without dieting is actually start not with a book or a program, but start with how you eat already. Your diet in the sense of like your habitual intake and just change dials on that degrees at a time. So to use an analogy, instead of just like throwing out all your clothes and getting a new wardrobe, if you took the clothes that you have now and just tailored this or that to fit a little better, maybe got rid of one of the things that's an ugly color, you know, you just change aspects of things, then it's a more gradual change.
And if you give yourself time to adjust into new eating patterns and develop new skills, then it tends to be less of an on off thing.
Haylin: So, we'll call this 3B, then, so not a fourth question.
Georgie: Okay.
Haylin: You and I know that there are other options aside from diets. I don't have the sense that most people do. They feel like diets are their only option. You and I would agree that, like, eating slowly and [00:12:00] undistracted, eating until satisfied, listening to your hunger cues work wonderfully well, and You've got... proof, and I've got some proof behind that. Why do so few people know about those approaches?
Georgie: That's a good question. I do know that I've read the statistic that eight out of ten people want a do it yourself approach when it comes to improving their fitness or their nutrition. So they're hesitant to hire a trainer or hesitant to hire a dietician.
And possibly that's because we think we know the answers. You know, sometimes people think like, I know how to do this. And so they feel like that'll work. I just need to do it. Or they've had temporary results in the past from a diet. And so they think that worked, you know, in their mind, they tell themselves that worked.
I lost 30 pounds, avoiding all carbs and sugar. And so what I need to do is just do that and not off. And that's a kind of closing your eye to the fact that your results included falling off. I guess you lost weight temporarily, [00:13:00] but more permanent changes yield more permanent results. And, yeah, I mean there's just such a big industry of short term fixes.
Partially because, you know, nobody really holds the industry accountable to a large extent. Like, if you hired somebody to fix your car and it didn't work, your car broke down the next day on the road, and you did some research and you found out like 95 percent of the people whose cars this mechanic has fixed actually still have the same problem, you'd be like, I'm never going to that mechanic again, I'm going to report him to the Better Business Bureau.
But there's no accountability on that same sense for people trying weight loss programs and diets. So, a lot of them don't work
Haylin: Right,
Georgie: Unfortunately
Haylin: so there's something to be said for the the marketing machine that is the diet industry and their ability to get Information in front of people
Georgie: 100 percent.
Yeah, and You know before and afters and things like that are really eye catching. They're great ways to get attention on social media and advertising And we, we now know that you can [00:14:00] fake them incredibly well. You can doctor photos. You can play with the light and a spray tan and, you know, dramatically make somebody look 30 pounds thinner or heavier and that also doesn't tell you about how that person maintained the weight loss, whether they did or didn't, you know, if it stayed off, so it's less exciting for somebody to say. Let me tell you about this great thing I did. I learned how to not eat emotionally, I learned how to cook healthier foods so they were tasty, and I learned to really slow down and enjoy my food.
That's just not as sexy as somebody that's like, I stopped eating cauliflower and lost 20 pounds, or I stopped eating bananas. Like, we want like the simple, fast approach. And People tend to gravitate toward those. But luckily I think as people mature, they recognize that all those rapid, overly simplistic, witchcrafty sort of things are all gimmicks.
And so I find like beyond a certain age, I don't know where I want to draw the line. I want [00:15:00] to say like 35 and up, more people are like, you know, I think I'm ready for something that's sustainable and sensible now. And I'm like, good, now we can work together.
Haylin: I love how you included whether or not something worked. Or it includes what happened after you stopped doing it, right? To decide whether or not it worked. It's like, if you're playing a game, quit at halftime. You can say you won the game, but the other team continued to play the third and fourth quarter. They probably won.
Georgie: Good point. Yes. Yeah. You were in the lead at halftime.
Good for you.
Haylin: Cool. All right, those are our three questions.
Georgie: Thanks. Awesome. Awesome.
Haylin: You crushed it.
Georgie: Thanks. All right.
Haylin: Bye georgie.
Georgie: See ya
Haylin: thank you. Bye ,
There you have it. Dear listener, the diet industry makes a lot of promises, but counts on your failure to continually feed the machine. The good news is we can all become confident, sensible eaters without ever having to go on another diet [00:16:00] again. Thanks so much for listening to our conversation today. We covered some crucial topics, shedding light on why diets are uncomfortable and often unsustainable. And what else you might try to do to reach your goals. And the significant changes that can come by just paying attention to how you eat. Rather than what you eat. Did today's conversation stir up some relatable thoughts of your own food and health journey? If you've been through multiple diets without success, there are alternative approaches beyond the extreme and flashy diet programs. It starts with the very simple step of listening to your body and starting where you are.
You can start practicing these habits in your own health and wellness journey today, and if you need a little bit of support, the coaches here at Confident eaters have got your back. If you'd like some one-on-one accountability and support in this, reach out to us at confidenteaters.com to find out more. And don't forget to check out the episode description to find out more about core [00:17:00] principles PT in Stamford, Connecticut. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you have a great day and we will see you in the next episode.