DIETS AND WILLPOWER

It’s no longer January; most of us have now abandoned their new year’s resolution to “Get fit and healthy”. Despite the most zealous of intentions, it is no secret that the majority of diets fail. In a poll by the UK newspaper the daily mail, the average diet lasts 5.5 weeks, with the average duration of a post-Christmas diet being even shorter at just three weeks.

This article investigates the physiological and psychological factors which are reducing your ability to reach your goals. Understanding why diets so often have an expiry date can help with how you might change your diet expectations for the better.  Also find out how you might harness the power of your psyche to make your diet a success.

One of the main reasons why diets are said to be doomed, is because of the modern-day shift in reward contingencies. Reward is a method through which behaviour can be shaped and reinforced. Often an unhealthy shift that people have made nowadays is to use food as a reward: you might remember being bribed as a child with a treat if you were ‘good’.

The same reward can be more ‘rewarding’ if it is delivered closer to the time that the desirable behaviour is performed. The behaviour becomes more reinforced as your brain associates the reward with the behaviour. If one considers that, through a mere click of a few smart screen keypad buttons, we can do anything immediately. We can order a dress or get weather updates from our smart phones NOW. In fact, we want, and indeed, expect to get everything NOW.

Apply this logic to junk food, which we often treat ourselves with. Sugar absorption in these high calorific treats is extremely fast. This means that the reward to the brain is delivered in extremely close proximity to the actual eating of the food. Dopamine circuits (the pleasure centre of the brain) are activated, and the behaviour of eating junk food becomes more satisfying over time.

The Science of Junk food:

According to a published article by Nature Neuroscience, high calorie food can be just as addictive as drugs. Just like drug addicts, the reward pathways were found to be blunted in response to sensitivity for the neural response pathways, which are usually activated during pleasurable experiences. This implicates a detrimental outlook for those activities which usually stimulate pleasure in the brain, such as exercise. These consequences make sense when you consider how hard it is to adapt to a

A problem with the instant reward system is that delayed rewards are perceived as less rewarding: which poses a problem for weight loss. Despite maximal efforts and best intentions, dieting (done in sustainable manner) will yield small progress towards a goal over the space of weeks and months. Furthermore, the small increments towards the underlying goal are not quite as satisfying when the perceived level of effort towards healthy food and exercise is high. This is a phenomenon known as “cogni

Conversely, a delay in punishment , or a negative reward, also does not do much to deter habitual behaviour as an instant punishment's would: which is why we can find ourselves needing a diet in the first place. Weight gain usually occurs slowly over time, and is often only identified once poor eating habits have already been formed. In short, the consequences of your Cheetos are not instantly visible on your hips and butt.

Therefore attempting a new regime which replaces your habits (of instant sugar reward) can quickly run out of steam: there are no visible and instant rewards for swapping your mint slice at lunch time for a salad. In fact, the apparent feelings of hunger or deprivation are perceived in the brain as pain, and stimulate the punishment receptors. These mechanisms are usually ones that are activated as a coping mechanism for survival and perception of pain, promoting the body to enhance avoidance, a

The presence of the stress hormone cortisol is negative to your dieting intentions for a number of reasons, but some of the main ones which can de-rail your diet include sleep disruption, muscle catabolism, and reduced immunity, and in some cases emotional eating! From these, sleep disruption can be the most destructive: not only will you find yourself moodier, and making poorer decisions (for example when it comes to food and exercise), but ghrelin (the hunger hormone) becomes released, which c

The final stage in the dieting de-railing process is advancement in the prefrontal cortex. It is the prefrontal cortex that has been hailed as the responsible factor in making humans the top of the food chain. The prefrontal cortex can synthesis and make ‘real’ imagined thoughts and scenarios. Furthermore it has been advocated as part of the ‘placebo effect’. For instance, if you believe benefit or detriment can be derived by doing something, it will. It is this particular element which is the f

The goal of a new diet, therefore, becomes too cognitively difficult: this is understandable. Usually by the end of two weeks sleep disruption has affected our judgement; stress levels are high (with everyday problems escalating due to cortisol and junk food withdrawal), grehlin is causing us to crave more food; the prefrontal cortex is telling us that all the effort that we are putting in is not working, and cognitive dissonance indicates that we might not even want to reach the number on the s