Traci Mann is the author of Secrets From The Eating Lab, a new book on why diets will always fail. She’s also a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, which is why she makes the correlation between psychology and failing food habits.

For the past 20 years, Traci Mann has been studying diets at the Health and Eating Laboratory located at the University. This lab is better known as The Mann Lab, because she and her researchers and subjects take up most of its time.

After 20 years of study Mann has concluded that diets are totally unnecessary for optimal health.

A Mighty Struggle

It’s because they just don’t work. There is no balance between biology and psychology when you force yourself to diet. “Genes,” Mann writes, “play an indisputable role in regulating an individual’s weight: Most of us have a genetically set weight range. When we try to live above or below that range, our body struggles mightily to adapt.”

A mighty struggle is not what our bodies are looking for. While work is important, and it’s important to exercise, nature looks for the path of least resistance. Everyone’s body (size, weight, hair colour) is determined by genetic factors. Based on these genes, there is a normal amount of food we are supposed to eat.

Can’t Zip Up Your Genes

But it doesn’t stop with genes. Mann also blames the failure of diets on neuroscience and psychology. Our brains are hard-wired to want food for survival, she explains, so restricting calories creates a psychological stress response, which facilitates weight gain. You cannot trick yourself into eating less, and that’s what diets try to do.

Also, she adds: “Studies show that willpower, the thing we all blame ourselves for not having enough of, is in many ways a mythical quality and certainly not something that can be relied upon for weight loss.”

After years of research Mann proposes ditching the diet. Instead of counting calories, for example, she suggests penalizing yourself for giving in to eating unhealthily. She also suggests thinking of foods differently – don’t succumb to the tastes and specific qualities of an unhealthy food (like a sugary, glazed donut for example). Think of it instead as: Just another breakfast food or generic dessert.

You must alter your mind, not your meal.

In her book, Mann stresses other changes as well. Use smaller plates. Smaller plates encourage smaller portions. There are many ways to address mindful eating; as previously mentioned, we are all biologically different, so there is no blanket-response that will work for everyone.

That’s why diets just don’t work. You have to choose something that is right for you.

What’s Added Is Addictive

Another big problem with dieting is the addictive nature of our foods. When you buy something from the grocery store that is packaged, there are always additives. Preservatives to make the food last longer, sodium and sugars to make it taste better, and other additives that aren’t in the whole, fresh foods.

Beyond “just not working” diets play other tricks on us. They can change your mindset. Mann stopped dieting after she realized it made her miserable. She also watched her parents diet and go through years of diet and regain, diet and regain.

When Mann devoted her life’s work to diets, she didn’t set out to prove they don’t work. She and her students wanted to look at the long-term outcome of diets. They wanted to be as unbiased as possible, trying different dieting techniques, and watching their outcomes over 20 years.

“The focus of my work, from the beginning, was the self-control of eating. I was looking for ways to keep dieters from overeating. Slowly, over the years, I came to realize that nearly everything I studied (e.g. stress, distraction, etc…) caused dieters to lose control of their eating, and it began to make sense to me why diets were so likely to fail.”

Mann’s book notes that we all have a unique weight that we can each reach healthily. She calls it your leanest livable weight. She describes this as: “A weight you can maintain while living a normal life.”

Make Human Nature Work For You

“Lean” isn’t the word to focus on. “Livable” is. Lean implies thinness, and that’s not necessarily true for all body types. Mann maintains that people diet because they believe that to be beautiful they must be thin, and if they cannot stay thin it is a sign of weakness, lack of self-control, and general personal failings. Diets fail because of biology and psychology.

Knowing this, you can make and follow some tips to eating more healthily. Mann calls it “mindful eating” and one trick is finding satisfaction in smaller portions.

“The strategies (to mindful eating) try to find ways to make human nature work for us, instead of against us. It’s human nature to struggle with willpower. So some of the strategies help us avoid situations in which we would need a lot of willpower.”

You must take advantage of human nature to make is easier to avoid unhealthy foods and access healthy choices. For example, putting obstacles up between you and unhealthy foods is a way to take advantage of laziness.

Mann says these are not tricks, because they will work even if you are fully aware of them.

Her final suggestion is to form habits because they will kick in automatically. One of her healthy habits is that the first thing she eats from her plate is a vegetable. She does this because she knows she’ll eat more of it when she is hungriest.

You’ve got to work with your own human nature, instead of battling it with a diet.

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SOURCE: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/01/411217634/in-eating-lab-psychologist-spills-secrets-on-why-diets-fail