When One Diet Leads to the Next

Weight-loss programs spend a great deal of time explaining how to lose weight. Far less attention is given to what happens afterwards. This blog explains how one diet can lead to the next in a repeating cycle.

If you complete a diet and lose weight, you’ll usually move into what’s called the maintenance phase. On the surface, that makes sense. You’ve expended all this effort and gone without to lose the weight, so of course you want to maintain the result. Particularly if you’ve been through multiple rounds of weight regain and really want this to be the time you finally keep the weight off.

What is maintenance in dieting

But the term maintenance can hide some of the biological reality of what has been happening while you’ve been dieting.

Biological systems don’t switch on and off according to the phases of a diet.

When you significantly reduce calories, your body responds to the changed conditions. Hunger can increase, metabolism can slow, and other changes can occur to conserve energy. The diet may announce that the weight-loss phase has finished and maintenance has begun, but your biology hasn’t necessarily finished responding to the restriction.

I often use holding your breath as a way of thinking about this.

You can deliberately hold your breath for a period of time. Eventually, though, your body takes over because it needs oxygen. And when you finally breathe, you don’t take your usual breath. You take big gulping breaths as your body restores the oxygen it has gone without.

We don’t make a personal judgement about those breaths. We understand that biology has taken over.

Rebound Eating - how one diet leads to the next

Catch-up or rebound eating following significant calorie restriction is obviously much slower to appear than the response to being deprived of oxygen. But the comparison gives us some sense of the power of a biological system when it detects a shortage of something it needs.

This brings me back to maintenance.

Maintenance language shifts responsibility for what happens next onto the woman. It suggests that once you’ve lost the weight, you simply need to keep doing what worked. If you don’t understand the biological response to restriction, it’s easy to conclude that you need to try harder next time.

Vivienne is a good example. She had dieted on and off for about two decades. She could lose weight, but she would quit the diet before it was finished and, over time, the weight would return.

Vivienne knew she was good at starting diets but had trouble sticking with them, so she chose diets that promised fast results. Her thinking was based on willpower rather than biology. She needed to lose the weight quickly, before her willpower ran out and she quit.

You can follow the logic. If dieting feels awful and experience tells you that you can only tolerate it for so long, a diet promising faster results is going to look attractive.

The problem was that faster results meant choosing harsher approaches with greater restriction and tighter rules. Over time, those choices became more extreme.

Vivienne eventually told me, “I knew I had seriously lost the plot when I was looking at a five-day water diet.”

Her dieting history wasn’t simply something that had happened in the past. It was influencing what she chose to do next.

Diets are not separate events

And this is why looking at diets as separate events can hide important information.

Most of us remember the diet we found easy, the one we did with a friend or sister, the one where we lost a lot of weight and the one where we swore we would never diet again. Viewed separately, they can become a collection of successes and failures.

Bring them together and something different can become visible.

Perhaps the diets became more restrictive. Perhaps the time you could stay on them became shorter. Perhaps what happened after each diet began influencing the diet you chose next.

That’s when your dieting history stops being a record of how well you performed on individual diets and starts becoming evidence.

Repeated weight regain isn’t a single event. It’s a pattern that can develop over years, which is why it needs to be investigated as a problem in its own right.

So rather than asking what you should do differently on your next diet, there’s another question worth considering:

What have all my previous diets been trying to tell me?

Some of the most useful information may not be found in the period when the weight was coming off. It may be in what happened afterwards.

Listen here:

Begin your own your investigation here: