by Sophie Pelham-Burn NMEDSCI, ANUTR
which often results in nutritional deficiencies and also has the potential to really disrupt your relationship with food. Any weight loss is usually from reducing your overall energy intake and using your glycogen stores so will rebound as soon as you start to eat normally again. No reset diet, cleanse or detox diet has ever been demonstrated in the research to have any long- term health benefits, and no reputable, well-trained nutritionist or dietitian would ever recommend such an approach. (Side note; most doctors only have a couple of hours of training in nutrition science, so are not reliable sources of nutrition information.) Make sure any nutrition advice you're taking comes from someone registered with the Association for Nutrition (AfN) or the British Dietetic Association (BDA). Weight loss does not equal Health Gain Although the terms are often used interchangeably, losing weight and improving health are not the same thing and I would be extremely wary of any diet or person that places the focus solely on losing weight. Body composition is much more linked to physical health, but don’t forget that the concepts of health and wellbeing need to include mental health as well. If what you’re doing to improve your body composition makes you miserable and risks having you miss out on social occasions with friends and family, I’d suggest having a think about whether it’s really right for you and what the net gain actually is. What you do with your body is totally your choice, but when I start working with any new client I always ask what their goals are, and then the question that a lot of people struggle to answer honestly ; Why? If the answer is to be healthier, there are lots of things you can do which will have a demonstrable impact on health without having to think about weight or body composition at all. If your Why is some other reason, have a think about whether your motivation is intrinsic or extrinsic? That is, whether it is something you want to do for you or whether it’s to fit someone else's ideas or ideals. Motivation is a lot stronger when goals and intentions come from intrinsic factors, so if you realise that the key motivator is extrinsic, maybe rethink. What is it you actually want to do? Whatever your answers to those questions are, one thing is very clear from the research. Any behavioural change needs to happen gradually, one thing at a time, to be sustainable. Making a long list of health or body composition resolutions that require too many changes at once isn’t conducive to actually implementing those changes into everyday life in the long term, and when it comes to making changes to body composition and health improvements, the little changes that we make and are able to keep up over time are the ones that matter.
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