A group of nutrition experts on social media are fighting diets they consider harmful – by encouraging healthy lifestyles, rather than playing off people's insecurities. — CHRISTIN KLOSE/dpa
REMEMBER the werewolf diet? It made rounds about 10 years ago and told adherants to fast according to lunar cycles, claiming to help them lose one to 2.7kg in the span of a day. Or how about the five-bite diet? This one says to skip breakfast and take only five bites of lunch and dinner.
You may be used to seeing these kinds of claims, usually pitched by beautiful, shredded individuals on the Internet. You may even be tempted to believe them.
Don’t, says Colleen Christensen, a registered dietitian based in Michigan who goes by @no.food.rules on Instagram. “I don’t recommend following any sort of specific diet plans or having really any food rules or saying you should – do something or you shouldn’t do something,” she said. “I embrace living in the grey.”
She’s one of a group of nutrition experts on social media who are fighting diets they consider harmful by encouraging healthy lifestyles, rather than playing off people’s insecurities.
Christensen and Erin Holt, who has a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and dietetics and hosts the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast from New Hampshire, help you sort facts from fads.
What are an influencer’s credentials?
This is a key question to ask yourself about dieting claims you see online. ”Who are you taking your information from? Because aesthetics are not a credential. How your body looks is not a credential,” Holt said.
Check if the person providing you information has any kind of professional certification. An ideal source would be a registered dietitian. If their job title isn’t clear, see if they have a degree in nutrition, a precision nutrition certification, an online coaching certificate or any other official documentation.
Just because you want to look like someone doesn’t mean that they are qualified to help you achieve what they have achieved. It’s flawed logic, Christensen said: “I brush my teeth every day, but I would never call myself a dentist.”
Also ask: Is a given diet plan effective for a wide range of people? Holt said people will react differently to different approaches.
”For example, intermittent fasting can be detrimental, even catastrophic for somebody’s health, and also it can be extremely therapeutic for somebody else’s,” she said.
Does this diet make sense?
Beware the quick fix. ”There will always be someone promoting the easy answer and the quick fix. That is a red flag,” Holt said. “There should be some level of suspicion around this. Health, food, nutrition, even weight loss is so contextual.”
Another thing to pay attention to is the timeline of weight loss. Christensen noted that some studies she has seen may not give the full picture. If a person loses weight and keeps it off for a year or two years, that may not indicate successful weight loss, she said.
”The evidence that we have for weight regain is typically a longer period” – two to five years, she said.
Is the advice practical?
When you see someone telling you what to eat, do a gut check. Ask yourself: Is this feasible for me, and do I want to do this? You may face barriers of access to fresh produce and other healthy foods, for example.
Sometimes people go on diets and the restrictions have an effect on their emotional state. People forget that food can bring just as much joy as it can anxiety.
Holt added: “The vast majority of women that are coming to me are actually undereating, not overeating. So that’s a huge misconception. What happens when we dramatically undereat our calories or undereat according to our maintenance needs, we can end up with thyroid dysfunction, hormone imbalance and immune system dysregulation.”
What’s the right mindset for diet and exercise?
Stop looking at your physical features as inadequacies or flaws, Holt and Christensen said. Evaluate your motivations. Are you trying to create a fuller life for yourself or are you doing it out of spite for your body? Your body does so much for you, they reminded, so take time to appreciate it and recognise that it is not the enemy.
Assess your feelings when it comes to food. “Do I want the food or the idea of the food?” Christensen suggests asking yourself.
You may be at a birthday party staring down a slice of cake. Ask: Is my body hungry? Do I want the cake because it will sustain me or because I associate cake with happiness and fulfillment?
Holt wants people to have a broader perspective on food. ”When we view food and eating only through the lens of ‘Will this make me skinny?’ that’s where we can get into trouble,” she said. ”When we put limits on a pedestal above all else, we can end up sacrificing our health.”
Say you are sitting at a restaurant. You have been eating your meal and enjoying yourself. You are completely stuffed but there is still food left on your plate, and it wouldn’t make for good leftovers.
You’re faced with a decision between what Christensen calls “two discomforts.” You are either sad that you didn’t finish the food you paid for or you finish it and are left with stomach pains for the rest of the night. Which feeling is more fleeting?
Christensen also urged people to remember that everyone’s body is different, and the way we look is not fully controllable. “Genetics plays a huge role in it,” she said. “Also our environment” and what we have access to.
What is your body trying to tell you?
Christensen said that we live in a society that tells us to cover up the messages from our bodies. “You have a headache, you take a pill. You’re not asking, ‘Why do I have this headache to begin with?’ You are taught to divorce yourself from the messages that are coming from your body, to quiet them down.”
Holt recommends listening to your internal hunger cues. With work, you can use them to figure out what nutrition your body needs and be confident enough to make decisions for yourself, she said.
When to seek help from a professional
If you feel anxiety about food, it can’t hurt to make an appointment with a registered dietitian.
”If you need help figuring out what information applies to you, in your unique context, that would be a great time to work with a nutritionist,” Holt said.“The other part is if you are struggling with integration, like, ‘okay, I know what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m just not doing it. I need help integrating this information.’”
The easiest way to find a dietitian is to have your primary care doctor refer you to one. In an appointment, the dietitian will assess your needs, counsel you on your options and what may or may not work for you, and create a nutritional plan. Then they’ll stay up to date with your progress to adjust if necessary.
”Any good coach or nutritionist or healthcare provider or practitioner should ultimately teach you how to feed yourself or how to be with yourself, find your own answers, versus being perpetually dependent on external authority figures,” Holt said. “No one knows more about your body than you.”
If you can’t afford to see a professional, social media can help you find a supportive community.
”With disordered eating or eating disorders, there’s so much secrecy to them and I think with that it can build up,” said Christensen. “So many people don’t know what’s normal anymore, and being able to have conversations about that, that is a very strong thing to do.”
Not black and white
Ultimately, both nutritionists recommended living in what they call ”the grey area.”
Holt describes it as somewhere between extreme opposition to dieting and eating without any thought whatsoever. “I do rage against diet culture a bit, but I think that in the anti-diet-culture world, the pendulum has swung so hard that it has disallowed any space for us to approach healthful eating." "There are some people who think any attempt to clean up your diet or change the way you eat is automatically labeled as diet culture. There has to be space for the grey area.”
Christensen said, “That grey area is going to look different for every single person. So I think that getting there is going to take some unlearning of all of those things because diet culture is so ingrained in us.” – Los Angeles Times/dpa/Emma Fox
