Darya Rose (@summertomato) is a neuroscience Ph.D and author of Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting. On this episode, we talk about the psychology behind forming habits and what we can do to make lifestyle changes that last.
The Cheat Sheet:
- If you’re one of three American adults who qualifies as obese, you’ve probably tried dieting. Has it worked?
- What’s the biggest mistake people make when trying to get healthy, lose weight, or make some other positive lifestyle changes?
- Why traditional willpower-based habits like dieting don’t work.
- How to use your own psychology against yourself to shed old bad habits and make new good habits stick.
- What’s the key difference between success and failure?
- And so much more…
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People love to get excited about the latest science on macro and micronutrients or the latest exercise craze, but completely ignore the importance of psychology in health.
On this episode of The Art of Charm, Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting author and neuroscience Ph.D Darya Rose explains why diets don’t work and how addressing the role of psychology is imperative to making lasting lifestyle changes. Enjoy!
More About This Show
If you’re one of three adults in the United States who qualifies as obese, chances are pretty good you’ve tried to make lifestyle changes to counter your inclusion in this grim statistic.
Whether your reasons for trying to escape from this not-very-exclusive club are because you suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, risk of stroke, or you just want to look and feel better, you’ve probably tried some combination of diet and exercise to remedy the problem.
But even if you do shed the extra pounds and manage to hit a target weight goal, it’s maintaining that ideal weight that proves to be so daunting for so many.
“Dieting is the worst,” says Darya Rose, author of Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting. “You’re starving all the time, so you can’t do anything really well because you’re always distracted. You can’t be social — you’re like the weirdo at dinner who’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll have the steamed chicken breast and the broccoli with no butter.’ It ruins your life because food is so pervasive that dieting is really a bummer.
“But on top of that, it also doesn’t work at all. It actually backfires; we have really good data and really good science that explains that if you go on a diet, you’re more likely to gain weight over the long term than to lose weight.”
One hypothesis currently being bandied about is that losing a lot of weight quickly — as seen on NBC’s reality television show The Biggest Loser — actually slows down the metabolism and makes gaining it all back that much easier.
Darya points out there’s also abundant psychological data supporting the idea that people who have a history of restricting themselves with specific foods tend to overcompensate for this restriction later.
“Our brains were not wired to make ourselves suffer,” says Darya. “When you do that to yourself, you end up creating all these horrible habits. People who diet are way more likely to go into binging later and have all these super unhealthy relationships with food…their mindset around food in general has become so out of whack with the way our brains healthily form habits.”
Listen to this episode of The Art of Charm in its entirety to learn more about how Darya overcame 15 miserable years of dieting, why dieting is a game you can’t win even if you’re an iron-disciplined overachiever, how to switch your goals from what you “should” do to what you want to do, why willpower is great for short-term goals but not for goals that are more long-term, the problem with the “no pain, no gain” mindset, how we can become addicted to good habits if we’re able to make it over the hump, how we moralize our food choices (and why we should stop), why no food is innately good or bad, how every habit has a trigger/action/reward, how eating mindfully can help modify our behavior, how previous guest Dr. Carol Dweck’s motivated mindset comes into play here, what we can do to make good habits stick, why Darya doesn’t support calorie counting over the long haul, and lots more.
THANKS, DARYA ROSE!
If you enjoyed this session with Darya Rose, let her know by clicking on the link below and sending her a quick shout out at Twitter:
Click here to thank Darya Rose at Twitter!
Resources from this episode:
- Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting by Darya Pino Rose
- Summer Tomato
- Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control by Darya Rose, Summer Tomato
- Darya Rose at Facebook
- Darya Rose at Instagram
- Darya Rose at Twitter
- Dr. Carol Dweck | The Motivated Mindset (Episode 445)
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- The Art of Charm Bootcamps
- Best of The Art of Charm Podcast
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- The Art of Charm Toolbox for Women
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