What Flexible Dieting Really Means

When Flexibility Is The Dish Of The Day

This is Alan Aragon. Notwithstanding not being a “Dr. Alan Aragon”, he’s a research scientist with dozens of peer-reviewed nutrition science papers to his name, as well as being a personal trainer and fitness educator. Most importantly, he’s an ardent champion of making people’s pursuit of health and fitness more evidence-based.

We’ll be sharing some insights from a book of his that we haven’t reviewed yet, but we will link it at the bottom of today’s article in any case.

What does he want us to know?

First, get out of the 80s and into the 90s

In the world of popular dieting, the 80s were all about calorie-counting and low-fat diets. They did not particularly help.

In the 90s, it was discovered that not only was low-fat not the way to go, but also, regardless of the diet in question, rigid dieting leads to “disinhibition”, that is to say, there comes a point (usually not far into a diet) whereby one breaks the diet, at which point, the floodgates open and the dieter binges unhealthily.

Aragon would like to bring our attention to a number of studies that found this in various ways over the course of the 90s measuring various different metrics including rigid vs flexible dieting’s impacts on BMI, weight gain, weight loss, lean muscle mass changes, binge-eating, anxiety, depression, and so forth), but we only have so much room here, so here’s a 1999 study that’s pretty much the culmination of those:

Flexible vs. Rigid Dieting Strategies: Relationship with Adverse Behavioral Outcomes

So in short: trying to be very puritan about any aspect of dieting will not only not work, it will backfire.

Next, get out of the 90s into the 00s

…which is not only fun if you read “00s” out loud as “naughties”, but also actually appropriate in this case, because it is indeed important to be comfortable being a little bit naughty:

In 2000, Dr. Marika Tiggemann found that dichotomous perceptions of food (e.g. good/bad, clean/dirty, etc) were implicated as a dysfunctional cognitive style, and predicted not only eating disorders and mood disorders, but also adverse physical health outcomes:

Dieting and Cognitive Style: The Role of Current and Past Dieting Behaviour and Cognitions

This was rendered clearer, in terms of physical health outcomes, by Dr. Susan Byrne & Dr. Emma Dove, in 2009:

❝Weight loss was negatively associated with pre-treatment depression and frequency of treatment attendance, but not with dichotomous thinking. Females who regard their weight as unacceptably high and who think dichotomously may experience high levels of depression irrespective of their actual weight, while depression may be proportionate to the degree of obesity among those who do not think dichotomously❞

Read more: Effect of dichotomous thinking on the association of depression with BMI and weight change among obese females

Aragon’s advice based on all this: while yes, some foods are better than others, it’s more useful to see foods as being part of a spectrum, rather than being absolutist or “black and white” about it.

Next: hit those perfect 10s… Imperfectly

The next decade expanded on this research, as science is wont to do, and for this one, Aragon shines a spotlight on Dr. Alice Berg’s 2018 study with obese women averaging 69 years of age, in which…

Flexible Eating Behavior Predicts Greater Weight Loss Following a Diet and Exercise Intervention in Older Women

In other words (and in fact, to borrow Dr. Berg’s words from that paper),

❝encouraging a flexible approach to eating behavior and discouraging rigid adherence to a diet may lead to better intentional weight loss for overweight and obese older women❞

You may be wondering: what did this add to the studies from the 90s?

And the key here is: rather than being observational, this was interventional. In other words, rather than simply observing what happened to people who thought one way or another, this study took people who had a rigid, dichotomous approach to food, and gave them a 6-month behavioral intervention (in other words, support encouraging them to be more flexible and open in their approach to food), and found that this indeed improved matters for them.

Which means, it’s not a matter of fate or predisposition, as it could have been back in the 90s, per “some people are just like that; who’s to say which factor causes which”. Instead, now we know that this is an approach that can be adopted, and it can be expected to work.

Beyond weight loss

Now, so far we’ve talked mostly about weight loss, and only touched on other health outcomes. This is because:

• weight loss a very common goal for many
• it’s easy to measure so there’s a lot of science for it

Incidentally, if it’s a goal of yours, here’s what 10almonds had to say about that, along with two follow-up articles for other related goals:

• How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
• How To Build Muscle (Healthily!)
• How To Gain Weight (Healthily!)

Spoiler: we agree with Aragon, and recommend a relaxed and flexible approach to all three of these things

Aragon’s evidence-based approach to nutrition has found that this holds true for other aspects of healthy eating, too. For example…

To count or not to count?

It’s hard to do evidence-based anything without counting, and so Aragon talks a lot about this. Indeed, he does a lot of counting in scientific papers of his own, such as:

How much protein can the body use in a single meal for muscle-building? Implications for daily protein distribution

and

The effect of protein timing on muscle strength and hypertrophy: a meta-analysis

…as well as non-protein-related but diet-related topics such as:

Does Timing Matter? A Narrative Review of Intermittent Fasting Variants and Their Effects on Bodyweight and Body Composition

But! For the at-home health enthusiast, Aragon recommends that the answer to the question “to count or not to count?” is “both”:

• Start off by indeed counting and tracking everything that is important to you (per whatever your current personal health intervention is, so it might be about calories, or grams of protein, or grams of carbs, or a certain fat balance, or something else entirely)
• Switch to a more relaxed counting approach once you get used to the above. By now you probably know the macros for a lot of your common meals, snacks, etc, and can tally them in your head without worrying about weighing portions and knowing the exact figures.
• Alternatively, count moderately standardized portions of relevant foods, such as “three servings of beans or legumes per day” or “no more than one portion of refined carbohydrates per day”
• Eventually, let habit take the wheel. Assuming you have established good dietary habits, this will now do you just fine.

This latter is the point whereby the advice (that Aragon also champions) of “allow yourself an unhealthy indulgence of 10–20% of your daily food”, as a budget of “discretionary calories”, eventually becomes redundant—because chances are, you’re no longer craving that donut, and at a certain point, eating foods far outside the range of healthiness you usually eat is not even something that you would feel inclined to do if offered.

But until that kicks in, allow yourself that budget of whatever unhealthy thing you enjoy, and (this next part is important…) do enjoy it.

Because it is no good whatsoever eating that cream-filled chocolate croissant and then feeling guilty about it; that’s the dichotomous thinking we had back in the 80s. Decide in advance you’re going to eat and enjoy it, then eat and enjoy it, then look back on it with a sense of “that was enjoyable” and move on.

The flipside of this is that the importance of allowing oneself a “little treat” is that doing so actively helps ensure that the “little treat” remains “little”. Without giving oneself permission, then suddenly, “well, since I broke my diet, I might as well throw the whole thing out the window and try again on Monday”.

On enjoying food fully, by the way:

Mindful Eating: How To Get More Nutrition Out Of The Same Food

Want to know more from Alan Aragon?

Today we’ve been working heavily from this book of his; we haven’t reviewed it yet, but we do recommend checking it out:

Flexible Dieting: A Science-Based, Reality-Tested Method for Achieving and Maintaining Your Optimal Physique, Performance & Health – by Alan Aragon

Enjoy!