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Fad diets: every single one of them works. · No Forking Nonsense - The Nutritionist UK

• 0:00
  @paulthenutritionist: Hello and welcome to another episode of No Forking Nonsense. And remember if you want to clean up your algorithm if you're fed up of being bush stuff, sold misinformation, given unfactual vague health and nutrition subscribe to this podcast. It will teach your algorithm that you are interested in only facts from experts. It will update your algorithm on your socials. You will be recommended more factual, useful, helpful and un toxic information on your algorithm.
• 0:34
  Do that, it is the easiest thing you can do to just improve your mental health and stop you being sold misinformation. Anyway, that's my public service. Let's get into today's episode. So today I am going to be defending bad diets. The keto, the carnivore, the alkaline, celery juice, cabbage soup, whatever is on your feed this week, they work.
• 1:00
  Every single one of them works. And the nutrition industry has spent twenty years telling you they don't, which is both wrong and the reason that you keep buying the next one. So today, I'm going do something slightly uncomfortable. I'm going to take their side for ten minutes using actual research and then I'm going to tell you the thing that's really going on.
• 1:24
  @paulthenutritionist: Some of you are not going to
• 1:25
  @paulthenutritionist: like the second half. So every fad diet does the same thing. It removes a category of food. Keto removes carbohydrate, low fat obviously removes fat. Carnivore removes plants, clean eating removes anything with a label.
• 1:39
  Fasting, well it removes a good chunk of the day really. Remove a category and what you're doing is removing a load of food that
• 1:48
  @paulthenutritionist: you were eating. So obviously you eat less and
• 1:51
  @paulthenutritionist: you lose weight. And that is it. That is the mechanism of dieting. There is no metabolic sorcery. There's nothing special.
• 2:01
  That is it. And here is why that beats the eat balanced diet in modern society. Rules are very easy to follow. Saying no bread is a decision that you make once, whereas saying a centsp of bread is a decision that you have to make a few times a day, maybe even a 100 times a week. And you are likely going to get it wrong most of the time, because it gets exhausting by Tuesday.
• 2:35
  Fad diets understand something that nutritionists have historically been quite bad at. People often don't want nuance 04:00 on a Friday.
• 2:47
  @paulthenutritionist: What they want is hard rules. And here is
• 2:51
  @paulthenutritionist: the evidence. In 2018 there was a study by Stamford University on six zero nine adults over a year and they randomised to a healthy low fat diet or a healthy low carb diet. This is the fight, so low fat versus low carb done properly at scale for a year. The result was that the low fat group lost 5.3 kilograms, the low carb group lost 6.1 kilograms. The difference between them was not really statistically different.
• 3:27
  Twelve months of doing the opposite of each other and the answer was about the same. And then they did something really clever. They genotyped everyone in advance, looking for the gene patterns that supposedly tell us whether you are a low fat person or a low carb person. They also measured insulin secretion, which is the other thing people claim predicts which diet suits you. But neither predicted anything.
• 3:53
  Being matched to your supposed genetic diet type made absolutely no difference to how much weight you lost. The only line in their research was to be sceptical of efforts to personalise weight loss and that might not need personalisation at all if you focus on the quality of the diet in the first place. So the entire find the right diet for your body type industry, so the DNA testing, the metabolic typing, the food intolerance panels, has a foundation of absolutely nothing. And that s the controversial bit and it s been there since 2018. So what is
• 4:31
  @paulthenutritionist: the problem? If they all work and the specific diet doesn't really matter, then what is going wrong? Well you stop and that's the whole thing and that's
• 4:43
  @paulthenutritionist: the entire problem in two words. It's not that you're on the wrong diet, you're not on the wrong macros, your genes aren't wrong, your hormones aren't wrong, your metabolism and your gut back to your ear aren't broken, you just stop doing the thing that was working in the first place because there was an end point. And now I have to
• 5:02
  @paulthenutritionist: be fair because this is
• 5:04
  @paulthenutritionist: I guess where the anti diet crowd usually declares victory, but they shouldn't. Because just eat sensibly and build sustainable habits has exactly the same failure rate, because everyone stops. Anyone selling you the perfectly sustainable approach that you will never quit, is still selling you a diet just framed in a different manner. So here s a bit that nobody mentions, back to that research study, because there s a detail in that study that changes everything and I have never once seen it quoted in a headline. Those 600 people didn't just get told which diet to follow and sent home, both groups received 22 small group sessions with health educators over twelve months.
• 5:55
  22. That's roughly a meeting every fortnight for a year. So when someone quotes you, well they lost six kilos on low carb, what they're actually quoting is, yet they lost six kilos on low carb with a year of fortnightly professional support and structure and measurement and accountability. So we're not replicating that study by doing keto off Instagram in your kitchen. The macros are what got the headline, they're cutting out carbohydrates, cutting out fats are what got the headline.
• 6:29
  But the 22 sessions are probably what did the work. If you manage to have 22 sessions across a year whilst being put on some kind of eating plan, with an aim to lose weight, it s very likely with experts checking you in every two weeks, you re going to get results. And if you think that that is a stretch, the diabetes prevention programme, which was done in 2002, looked at three thousand two hundred and thirty four people at high risk type two diabetes, with three arms, placebo, metformin, which is obviously a prescription drug and an intensive lifestyle programme, A 16 lesson curriculum with a case manager, targeting 7% weight loss and one hundred and fifty minutes of activity a week. After around three years, this is the result. Metformin reduced the incidence of type two diabetes by thirty one percent, the lifestyle programme reduced it by fifty eight percent.
• 7:28
  So structured, supported, coach behaviour change beat the drug by nearly two:one. And in participants 60 the lifestyle programme reduced it by seventy one percent. There was no secret food list there, what there was, was a curriculum, an education, a target and guess what? An expert whose job was to keep you on it. So we need to be
• 7:55
  @paulthenutritionist: a little bit straight here. I not going to pretend that I ve
• 7:58
  @paulthenutritionist: got a diet that you haven t heard of. I haven't, in fact nobody has. Because what the research is actually telling us is that the boring stuff is the stuff that's hardest to do on your own and that is someone to report to. When you have someone in your corner who you have to report into, who understands you, who is taking the responsibility of
• 8:24
  @paulthenutritionist: how to execute the plan, what happens is you are more likely to succeed. We
• 8:33
  @paulthenutritionist: know that because every trial that produces decent results has that built in, but it never makes a headline because it's boring.
• 8:41
  @paulthenutritionist: Everyone will stall, right? On your own, if you stall,
• 8:47
  @paulthenutritionist: it feels like you've completely fucked up and you failed and so that's where you quit. When you have someone who's experienced and an expert who understands what you're going through, who you communicate to, who's empathic towards you, who understands the stalling, then what happens is that stall becomes a data point and then you adjust it. And the difference between these two responses is usually the difference between having a few weeks of progress, having six months of progress and having progress that restarts every Monday or every January. The moment that your progress slows, the instinct when you're on your own is to just cut more things out,
• 9:29
  @paulthenutritionist: drop another meal, add more cardio. That
• 9:33
  @paulthenutritionist: is just the move that starts that binge and restrict cycle that we've talked about a few weeks back and it's completely predictable and it's also very hard to talk yourself out of it all of the time. You are not the expert when it comes to understanding your human biology, how your body responds to certain foods, why your energy is dipping and why you can t get results over the long term. The amount of people who come to me and they say I ve tried everything I can t lose weight and within two weeks they ve started
• 9:59
  @paulthenutritionist: to lose weight. When your situation feels unique to you,
• 10:04
  @paulthenutritionist: unfortunately it usually isn't. That isn't me being dismissive of you being a unique individual. It's that when you are an expert and you have worked with hundreds of people, it's actually good news. Because it means that the problem that you're stuck on has an answer. And this is why when I have conversations with people, I say to them, I have a resource for every problem that you're about to face.
• 10:28
  And the reason why I'm so confident in that is because I have a library of years of clients who have worked with me and when they have a problem, I will create a resource for them and we will use that resource in future. Now, if you come to me with a problem that I haven't fixed, I bloody love that because this is my thing. I love fixing the puzzle of nutrition and I create a resource, we fix your problem and guess what, somebody in a year's time who also has your very unique problem has access not only to a resource, but my experience knowledge on fixing that problem. So here's the honest caveat. A nutritionist is not magic.
• 11:06
  I can't make you eat differently. I've never once made anyone do anything. All I do is make it much harder to drift and much easier to restart. I make it much easier for you to understand what is going on. I make it much easier for you to work through the barriers so that when we're faced with them in future, we know how to pick
• 11:28
  @paulthenutritionist: it up. Just yesterday, I had a client who had a tricky week. Life happens, right?
• 11:36
  @paulthenutritionist: Work stresses, family stresses, personal life
• 11:40
  @paulthenutritionist: stresses and they had a
• 11:42
  @paulthenutritionist: week where things didn't go to plan.
• 11:45
  @paulthenutritionist: They said to me that before what would have happened
• 11:48
  @paulthenutritionist: is that week would have turned into a month of just absolute carnage. She had two days where things didn't go to plan and she recognised within herself and she self corrected and she picked it back up. So what would have been a week, maybe a month of absolute carnage turned into two days. Two days of things not going how she wanted, she self corrected herself and then we picked
• 12:09
  @paulthenutritionist: up the pieces. But the
• 12:11
  @paulthenutritionist: thing is that this only works if you turn up. I've had very few cases, but I have had cases where I've sacked clients. And I've sacked clients because they have paid money to work with me, but they haven't shown up. They've floated away. They've been inconsistent.
• 12:31
  They haven't checked in weekly. They haven't given me those regular touch points. So obviously they're not going to get results. And that's on me and them. It's on me because maybe I should have clocked early on that perhaps the why isn't strong enough.
• 12:46
  Perhaps I should have clocked early on that this wasn't the right route for them. Perhaps what they needed was a very restrictive diet that causes them to change everything all in one go and you know, they become a monk and they don't do any social things. But it's not for everyone, which is why by the way this podcast is free and it always will be, and why everything I ve said today, you could probably act on this afternoon without spending a penny. Which is why I also say to most people, you can go on AI. In fact, I would encourage you to go on AI, put in as much information as possible about you, what you want to achieve and see how far you get.
• 13:26
  Because the information is there. The problem is never the information, it s about having a human who understands you, who is in your pocket, that you can reach out to when you ve got a wedding this weekend, who you can reach out to when you go into a restaurant this weekend and you re concerned as to what you should eat and you re overwhelmed by all this information. So you send a message to your nutritionist, your nutritionist will look at the menus and go why don't we try and have
• 13:48
  @paulthenutritionist: this that and the other. So here's what I want you to
• 13:51
  @paulthenutritionist: take from this. Number one, every diet works in the short term because they all remove food in some vodka. There is no metabolic magic in any of them. Number two, when you test them properly against each other, the differences are small. Remember 600 people, 12 mums, low fat against low carb, five point three kilos against six point zero eight kilos.
• 14:11
  Number three, the idea that your genes tell you which diet suits you did not survive contact with the evidence. That was tested directly and it predicted absolutely nothing. Fourthly, the problem is never going to be which diet is right for you. What we know is that the issue is that everybody stops eventually because everything is so restricted. A diet doesn't work.
• 14:38
  What we need to do is we need to reshape our habits, we need to learn about how our body is responding and we need to be very specific about our own lifestyle to ensure that our eating supports our lifestyle. Number five. The thing that separates the trials that work from the diets that don t, is never the food. It s the 22 sessions, the expert, the manager who s looking after your case, the curriculum, that person checking in with you. That's the ingredient that the headlines always leave out.
• 15:12
  And it is the one that's genuinely hard to buy. So the next time somebody tells you they found this perfect diet that genuinely works, they might be right. But then check-in with them seven months later. If you have struggled and you have tried everything, if you are sat there saying I just can't get results, can't be consistent, I feel like I know the right things to do but I just can't do it. If you feel like you just don't know what to eat, how to eat, why to eat, when to eat, reach out to me below.
• 15:44
  I am an expert at this and I can promise you, if you want it enough, we will get you results.
• 15:51
  @paulthenutritionist: Chat to you next week.