Flexibility

Flexibility in your diet is crucially important. Research into nutrition shows us time and again that dieting approaches which are flexible are more successful in the long-term, even if more rigid and drastic approaches can help you to make a very important initial positive step.

The reason that fast initial weight loss can help is most likely due to the fact that early progress creates a greater belief in your ability to change, but also provides some motivation for continuing the trend – but it’s still the case that over the longer term, flexibility is key.

A good way to think of this is that dietary flexibility and dietary duration have an inverse relationship, with long-term dietary approaches allowing more ‘wiggle room’ for the dieter and shorter term approaches having the requirement to be stricter.

Dietary flexibility takes on two guises which we can delve in to separately, namely flexibility on food choice and a broader dietary flexibility in the more general sense. Let’s look at the applications of both starting with food choice flexibility.

Flexibility and food choices

So far in this course we have mentioned and then reinforced the idea that food choices and food ‘quality’ matter. ‘High quality food’ here describes foods which are minimally processed and nutrient dense, though of course it’s an imperfect system because some processed foods (olive oil, whey protein and supplemental fish oil being key examples) are extremely useful when building a diet, whereas some minimally processed foods like canned tuna (high in mercury), unpasteurised milk (greatly increased risk of transferrable disease compared to pasteurised) and raw almonds (rich in cyanide) aren’t a good idea to eat in varying degrees – 1-2 cans of tuna per week in non-pregnant women is fine but we certainly don’t recommend any raw nuts or legumes.

As a general rule, though, minimally processed foods are the way to go. We say minimally processed rather than unprocessed because this allows for sauces, pastes, oils, cheese, wholemeal breads/pastas and a huge amount of other foods. It’s hard to pin down a clear description because there are too many variables at play, but this should give you a very good appreciation of what to include in your diet most of the time, and what you should not. If in doubt, check the label.

This leaves two big questions unanswered, namely:

• Why are minimally processed foods better?
• If this is the case, why include any other stuff at all?

As a closing section to this module, let’s discuss both of these.

Why are minimally processed foods better?

There are a few reasons to consider minimally processed foods to be better choices day-to-day than more processed foods:

• Minimally processed foods tend to be less palatable than more processed foods. This sounds like we are saying that minimally processed foods don’t taste good but of course that isn’t the case, we don’t really need to tell you that whole foods don’t taste bad. What is important to appreciate, is that to some people water will never taste as good as Coca Cola, an apple will never taste as good as apple crumble and that a grilled chicken breast will never top something southern-fried and covered with BBQ sauce and cheese. Processed foods are made specifically to be hyper-palatable and while that can create a short-term explosion of delicious enjoyment, it can help you form poorer habits around your eating
• As above there are notable exceptions here, for example peanut butter is barely processed at all but tastes fantastic and is very easy to overeat. Each food should be taken as an individual case, but the processed/not dichotomy is a usable generalisation
• Minimally processed foods are very often more micronutrient dense than equivalents – exceptions being some fortified foods such as iodised salt or fortified milk substitutes
• Minimally processed foods are generally more satiating per mouthful – though with dairy products you often should make a judgement call. For example, a fat free unsweetened yoghurt loses its satiating effects to some degree but loses a lot of calories per spoonful, so is the trade-off worth it at the time?

This is all great, but we must also consider the fact that in the real world it’s never going to be possible to stick to a rigid approach for very long. Temptation is always going to arise and if your diet is making you neurotic about going for meals out with friends or actively making it impossible to enjoy your life as much as you ideally should be, then there is a problem. It may be the case that eating a 100% unprocessed diet would be best at least on the surface, but if you can only adhere to your 100% approach 70% of the time then would it not be better to be 90% on point, 100% of the time? This is why including some junk or bad food is part of any reasonable dietary approach.