The Sirtfood Diet
The newest, most trendy way to f*ck your relationship with food, all over again!
Our fascination with celebrity culture naturally leads us to want to follow in the footsteps of people who seem to be successful on multiple fronts, mainly being attractive and having a lot of money.
So naturally, after the singer Adele’s weight loss caused a viral reaction from the internet wanting answers,‘The Sirtfood Diet’ that she followed, which is now a book written by nutritional medicine practitioners Aidan Goggins and Glen Matten, has become the new hottest weight loss trend.
Image from: Bojack Horseman (Netflix Series): Season 2, Episode 8
What is the Sirtfood Diet?
The Sirtfood Diet is a rigid eating plan that puts people into a severe calorie deficit where you drink green juice and then patiently wait until the end of the day where you shed tears of joy over your one glass of red wine and 2 squares of dark chocolate following a kale salad, which was literally just raw kale with 1 tsp olive oil. If you can stick with this plan for 7 days you could lose 3.5kg!
Well, that’s not exactly what the protocol says, but it is still essentially putting yourself into a calorie deficit and then tricking other people into believing that you are losing weight because of what you’re eating, rather than how much you’re eating.
The first 7 days of the diet prescribes 1000 calories a day with weight loss up to 7 pounds (3.2kg)!
How does the Sirtfood Diet work?
Just to clarify, in case everyone needed a reminder. You could lose 3.2kg in a week eating 1000 calories of literally anything. If I were trying to crash diet on 1000 calories for a week to lose a quick 3.2kg for a special event, I’d at least pick foods that excited me a little bit more than kale and olive oil.
The other fact people need to realise, is that on any diet the weight that you lose initially isn’t 100% fat. You are depleting your muscles of stored carbohydrate which flushes water from your body, and you also won’t have as much food sitting in your gut which makes a difference.
In fact, many people can quite easily stick to eating 1000 calories per day if they were to do it for just a week, because the hunger response to dieting often occurs later down the line once adipose (fat tissue) cells have already decreased in number. Combined with the fact that motivation tends to be higher when people know that they only have to diet for a week, it’s completely doable.
If you really did want to give that a go, my advice would be to load up on as much lean protein, fiber, water and nutrient dense foods (a decent variety of vegetables) as you can realistically fit into your calories, take a multivitamin and omega-3 supplement and cut out any calorie dense foods that don’t offer any satiety (like oil, added sugar and sauces). Just pick foods that you actually like, track your calorie intake accurately, and you’ll have no trouble at all apart from some mild, manageable hunger.
The problem with ‘Crash Diets’
I generally recommend against crash dieting due to the fact that they don’t encourage lifestyle change and inevitably people end up getting hungry and binge eating and feeling like they’ve committed some sort of crime against themselves.
Very few diet books address the emotional response that is almost universal when people follow a diet and then don’t stick to it.
Only the success stories are ever mentioned, where people will share how they might have tried every single diet out there until they finally found this one particular diet and now they’ve managed to lose weight and keep it off.
Anyone who hasn’t had success on the same diet ends up blaming themself for their lack of willpower or questions whether they were following the diet properly.
We are more likely to blame ourselves rather than the diet; if it worked for them why isn’t it working for us?
The recurring theme in diet books sounds like ‘This is your golden ticket to health and thinness, by not following this plan you’re sabotaging yourself. We’ve even included recipes in the back section and a meal planner to make this easy for you, you’d have to be really stupid to mess this up.’.
The reality is, you can achieve success on any diet. Go ahead, pick one that sounds good to you. As long as you’re meeting basic nutrient requirements and eating enough protein, you have my approval. But the number 1 determining factor as to whether you are going to succeed on that diet is purely psychological (oh right, and being in a calorie deficit).
The psychology of successful dieters
Often the people who achieve success on diets are motivated because they have experienced pain from being in their current condition.
They reach a point where they realise that their condition is making them unhappy. They see a bad photo of themself, they have a health scare, they hear or read comments about their body from other people, they can’t fit their clothes anymore or they break up with their partner and become scared that someone else won’t find them attractive.
I hate to say it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those sort of pain points are what drive celebrities with their own health and fitness goals.
So if you want to lose weight, here’s an idea. Think about whatever uncomfortable feeling you’re trying to move away from and use that as your motivation to move as far away as possible from your current condition. With all of that energy and drive, absorb yourself into research and learn how to make feeling confident your biggest priority.
If your uncomfortable feeling really isn’t making you that uncomfortable… Then in all honesty that’s probably why you’ve felt like such a failure with your dieting history. It’s probably messed you up a little bit too, because you keep blaming your own willpower.
If that’s you, then you should consider it amazing that you haven’t experienced major emotional pain from being in the body that you’re in!
What that will mean for you if you still want to lose weight, is that your process will have to be a lot more steady. Gradually make shifts and swaps in your diet until it becomes second nature. Gradually introduce or increase exercise and daily step targets. All-or-nothing changes, or following a completely different plan to what you’re used to, will simply not work because your emotional driver isn’t strong enough to perform such a radical switch for a sustained period. The most challenging part for you, is that you’re just going to have to be patient and accept that mistakes will happen!
Same goes for those coming off a diet. Instead of going straight back to old habits, you will gradually allow yourself to eat more normally while holding onto any new habits you have picked up that should be relatively health-promoting (for example, preparing your own food, doing daily activity, having salad with your meals and cutting back on alcohol and desserts).
In conclusion
THAT is my take on the Sirtfood Diet, well, actually any diet. I realise I didn’t actually go into a lot of detail with the specifics on the Sirtfood Diet, mainly because it’s trash and that’s all you need to know.
You’re not failing with diets because your willpower sucks. You’re failing because you don’t have a painful enough emotional driver, or reached a ‘rock-bottom moment’ to try and stick to a crash diet, like celebrities might do.
My advice is, to save you the hassle and heartbreak of trying to hate-your-body-skinny, is to firstly decide whether you even need to lose weight to be happier (maybe you could just exercise and eat well because you want to? Radical, I know) and THEN to make gradual eating and exercise changes that you will be able to stick to long term, either for weight loss or just to be healthier.
The only way to lose weight is to be in a calorie deficit. You can do that by either tracking calories or limiting certain foods from your diet that are probably counterproductive to weight loss and adding in foods that make you feel full, like protein and fibre.
Anybody who tells you that there is only one way to diet is an asshole and has no awareness of the emotional repercussions of their advice, or if they do, it’s a strategy to make more money out of your own vulnerability.
I really hope that this gives at least some people clarity over what diets are really doing to our emotional health and helps to illustrate how much dogma there is in the diet-culture world. Of course you can lose weight if you want to, but it’s important to be able to think critically about the type of claims we often see coming at us from diet book authors. If you’re brave enough, I encourage you to join me in my boycott against diet books with realisation that they truly offer very little to our wellness as society.
