How Some Diets Can Ruin Your Physical and Mental Health

Is the Pursuit of Wellness Through Diets Making You Ill?

If you know WillPowders at all, you’ll know it’s not a diet!  This is because diets are inherently stressful for your mind, body and brain.  It is a marvel if a diet doesn’t make you regain that lost weight and the rest in the end.  Scholars suggest that this is because we tend to eventually start doing things like binge eating, slowing down metabolism, interrupting the hunger-satiation hormones so that we end up being hungry more of the time, even when the ‘diet’ has ended.  If your chosen diet company isn’t, for example, clued up about addressing obesogens such as non-steroid oestrogens and parabens, helping you build your knowledge of how these disrupt your weight, then you might be proverbially peeing in a high wind no matter how little they say you eat, or how pumped up on pasta they promise you can get.   You’ll end up wanting high sugar, high fat and high calorie density foods which is exactly where you started.   And then, who will you pick on and blame?  Answer: yourself and your body and that, friends, is stressful and corrodes mental and physical health.

As soon as you consider a diet, you experience survival stress.  Although the word diet itself merely means the range of foods that you habitually eat, which is a pretty neutral way of looking at the word, it is, unfortunately, a word that’s been hijacked so its primary meaning is now almost forgotten and its secondary meaning rules supreme.  That secondary meaning takes us to hellish and stressful worlds of restriction, deprivation and self-kiddology.  There is no better way to invoke the might of your sympathetic nervous system than to shift from having a diet to going on a diet.  And don’t be fooled by the word ‘sympathetic’ - it’s the part of the nervous system that awakens the four F’s - fight, flight, freeze, fawn - and those four harpies will make damn sure that you end up eating anything and everything in the long run, making your life a misery in the end.  So, while we might have feelings of hope, even euphoria, that we are doing ourselves a favour when we suddenly start restricting calories by force, because this time it will surely lead to wellness (will it?) and we might have some beginner’s luck feeling self-congratulatory in the first week as we feel like an adrenaline-filled marine on special manoeuvres, make no mistake that your body knows better than modern diet culture and, in indubitable fact, your brain will be the ultimate judge of everything you are doing with your food intake.  Add this to the fact that as soon as you’ve stepped on a restrictive diet regime that suggests low fat but go ahead on the carbs, your body is under stress and your mind has picked a fight it won’t be able to see through and get the results it imagines it wants.  

Under stress, the brain has to work harder, so it will consume more calories.  That higher calorie demand is going to start this chain of events: it will make sure it does not run out of the energy it needs to keep going.  It’s only job is to keep you alive.  That is, sometimes, what we forget when we inhabit Diet Culture.  It’s a concept called The Selfish Brain.  When the brain senses it’s going to have to use more energy to deal with stress and this could engender fuel scarcity, it will ensure you fuel up with energy dense foods.  Note now that in the study, the salad course did not cut it as far as the brain was concerned - it’s simply not satisfied with this attempt at fobbing it off.   The brain releases chemicals that make you feel like you have low blood sugar, so you’ll feel shaky and hungry with a low mood and possibly confusion, in fact, plenty of the serious symptoms that diabetics have when they experience a blood sugar low.  We naturally want to eat a quick sugar fix. 

Even though you are awash with blood sugars, your insulin won’t be able to reduce the sugars as the brain believes it needs them right now and it isn’t about to let you cut off its supply.   If the stress continues, and, why wouldn’t it as you’re on a restrictive diet that you invited into your life, the feelings of needing more fuel will continue.  Now you are in a fight with your mind believing your willpower isn’t good enough (it’s not, but that isn’t your fault and now you know why) and so you begin to self-criticise which adds to your stress because now you believe you are crap at looking after yourself and so the whole thing forms a horrible Catch 22.  No wonder Type 2 diabetes seems to go hand in hand with present information on so-called ‘healthy’ diet culture.  In a few short steps, it’s wrecking your physical health too - all that blood sugar is destroying your capillaries and inviting in insulin resistance.   Now you have the threat of an influx of other comorbidities like sleep disorders, hypertension, heart disease, depression.   Plus your mental health is on the floor and you want to do the impossible and climb out of your own body.  Nothing like self-hatred to bring on more stressful feelings of anxiety and depression, now, is there?

But, on that type of diet, the hunger does feel uncontrollable because we are trying to control it with low fat and high sugar.  Hunger will be the phoenix from the flames, continually.  Let’s face it, hunger is supposed to cause you angst in order to keep you alive so you solve the problem by eating.  If hunger’s the body and brain’s way of keeping you alive, it’s going to be an omnipotent force where your mind is concerned.  

Join us and move towards what feels naturally well for your body and brain which will look after your mind, your mental and physical wellbeing.   We call it the WillPowders Way but we might also call it the WillPowders Wellspring of Wonder for your mind, brain, body and life spark!

To read more about factors that affect why we may be overweight and the problems we can invite in by ‘dieting’ try Obesity and Set Point Theory Venu Madhav Ganipisetti; Pratyusha Bollimunta

To read more about the fascinating way your brain will prioritise itself over your diet mindset, read Peters A, Kubera B, Hubold C, Langemann D. The selfish brain: stress and eating behavior. Front Neurosci. 2011 May 30;5:74. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2011.00074. PMID: 21660101; PMCID: PMC3105244.