Why Diets Don’t Work (Even When You Follow Them Perfectly) | Sarah Ann Macklin

0:00I'm going to talk to you about something that's been on my mind for the last 10 years. Now, I want to pose this question to you and see how you feel. You're doing everything right. You're eating well, you're exercising, you're optimizing. Somehow, you aren't feeling as well as you hoped. Well, this for me was what happened at the age of 21. And I ended up in hospital, barely conscious, multiple birth cysts, urosepsis, E. coli poisoning, the list goes on. And the doctors had a diagnosis, but the real one was shorter. For the last two years, I have kept a secret from you, and it's this. It's my new book, Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard.

0:43And I think it is a problem that we are all feeling. And I was feeling it so much that I wrote a book on it. Now, if you've been a guest of this podcast for a while, you know that I am all about kindness, self-compassion. But when I dug into the research of this, my mind exploded. The connection between the mind and body is so integral, but we completely miss out on all the conversations on health, on how we speak to ourselves. And that is such a driving factor on how our food responds to what we eat to, the choices that we make. And we are so overwhelmed right now in the$8.5 trillion industry that is the wellness industry, which is predicted to be by 2027.

1:23So if you need a helping hand, if you want a new way to live and be well, then buy my new book, Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard, out on May the 28th, but you can pre-order it now. I'll pop the link below in the show notes and I would love if you could support me on this and I honestly think it will support you too. I trained myself to ignore every signal my body ever sent. And it finally found a way to make me listen. Fast forward 15 years. The wellness industry today is predicted to be worth$8.5 trillion. Over 60 % of us are taking supplements and we're getting sicker. 96 % of adults don't hit their daily fiber intake and over 80 % don't eat five fruits and vegetables a day.

2:13I think about this and I think it's not a knowledge problem. We all know what to eat. You guys who listen to this show, you're smart. You know how to eat well. So what is it? We've all been there. Maybe you're scrolling in the morning and before you go to bed, you see that person, you see their flat stomach, you see their morning routine, you see their productivity, and something inside of you shifts. And it's not envy, it's not quite admiration. that feeling, it sits somewhere in between. The one that says, why can't I just get it together? And suddenly you're Googling when you're on Claude or on ChatGPT, what's the supplement that they mentioned?

2:54What's the program? What's the plan? What's the thing that's finally going to make this stick? Because this time it's going to be different. This time you found the answer. and for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, it works. You feel in control. You feel like you're finally making it happen and then life happens and you miss a day and then you eat the wrong thing that you said that you wouldn't and then your sleep doesn't go to plan and you miss the workout and then this is what happens. That internal voice starts. It says you're weak, you always do this why can't you just be consistent because isn't consistency the biggest thing that we hear about productivity and so you start again this time harder this time more restrictive more disciplined and so that cycle continues the try slip shame restart and I know that like I'm not the only one that fills this we're not failing because we lack information and we're not failing because we lack willpower.

3:58We're exhausted at being at war within ourselves. But it's funny because nobody in the industry is talking about that. Now, I want to talk about one of the most engaged reels I ever posted. And this happened after a really long day in clinic. This was about three and a half years ago. And I got home and I was exhausted and I ordered a pizza, something that I tell myself I shouldn't do. Yes, you know, I'm a nutritionist and I still eat pizza. But as I stood there waiting for that doorbell to ring, a really familiar wave of guilt washed over me and I questioned myself, why am I stuck in this cycle?

4:35Even years of studying nutrition and knowing all the things I know, why am I still in this cycle? Because the funny thing is health is not simple maths. It's not just calories in, calories out, although a lot of people would argue that. It's not just more steps or more protein or more discipline. Health also lives in your thoughts, your emotional landscape, the way that you speak to yourself at 11pm when you've eaten something you told yourself that you wouldn't. Every thought you have is a whole body experience. Every emotion you feel literally changes your physiology. And the more we obsess over getting it right, the further that we drift away from what truly makes us live well and be well.

5:21So in that moment, I picked up my phone and I recorded a very long reel about self-compassion. But what I wasn't quite prepared for on that day was how many of you flooded in, how many DMs, comments, messages that I got. That Instagram reel opened up my eyes to just how universal this struggle really is. Like the way that we handle stress, the stories that you tell yourself, the criticism that you carry, none of it stays in your head. It moves through your body and it lives in your hormones, in your gut, in your immune system. And your mind and your body, they're not two separate systems. They run parallel to each other.

6:01They're more like inseparable best friends I talk about. And most of us haven't really ever been taught that. So we keep trying to like fix the body while ignoring everything the mind is doing. And so we track our sleep whilst we lie awake, criticizing ourselves. We eat that salad with a side of shame. We do that workout fueled by self-loathing. And we wonder why it never feels enough. When we actually break it down like that, it kind of sounds a bit obvious. So if you truly want to change your health, not just for 30 days or for the holidays, but for like truly the long term, and it might surprise you that I say this as a nutritionist, but the place to start isn't with your plate.

6:51It's actually the relationship that you have with you. At the heart of that, it means something that most of us haven't visited in years. Self-compassion. and I know what you're thinking because I thought it too. Self-compassion, it sounds, sounds a bit much, doesn't it? It's a bit sickly. It's a bit of the whole self-help. It's a bit weird and I felt the same way and I actually spoke to Oliver Berkman about this on my podcast and the first time I mentioned this was two years ago to him and he said something that really stuck with me. When you feel the cringe, lean in to the cringe, because that is the resistance.

7:36And that's exactly where the work is. And it made me ask, why do we find it so strange and weird to be kind to ourselves? We'd never speak to a friend the way we speak to ourselves, not even close. But somewhere along the way and somehow we've been taught that being hard on ourselves is the way that, you know, keeps us sharp, keeps us motivated. It keeps us from getting lazy. And I understand that. And to a point, it definitely does. But here's what I know from my own body and from most clients that walked through my door and sat across me, they kind of came a bit of a mirror is that chronic self-criticism is exhausting.

8:21It isn't productive and it isn't growth. It's actually just depleting. It's draining. It's that kind of tired that like sleep doesn't fix. And in my opinion, we confuse self-criticism with self-improvement. But they're not the same thing because as someone far wiser than me once put it, the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections ever will. And that to me, that like whole analogy I find so important. And so when I started writing my new book, Healthy Shouldn't Be This Hard, I wanted to know like, what's the science? Like, you know, for me, self-compassion has always felt quite woo-woo.

9:09And I'm wanting to look at the research, wanting to look at the science. And so I remember asking this amazing Harvard professor called Dr. Ellen Langer onto my podcast. And I was already deep into writing Healthy Shouldn't Be This Heart, my book. And honestly, there were some moments when I was writing that, that I questioned myself, wondering if what I was going to say was actually going to land. It kind of felt a little bit out there. And whether the wellness landscape or the health landscape was actually ready to hear that the missing ingredient wasn't another protocol. And then in this conversation with Ellen, she told me about this study.

9:45She said that she worked with hotel maids. So women who were on their feet all day, they're lifting, they're bending, they're cleaning beds, they're physically active every single hour of their shift. But when she asked them, how often did they exercise? Most of them replied with, well, hardly ever because I don't have any time to exercise. And they didn't see that what they were doing was like valuable movement and was actually exercise. So their bodies, in a sense, weren't fully registering it either. And then Ellen divided these into two groups. One group was told in detail exactly how much physical activity they were doing, how many calories they were burning, how their work counted as real meaningful exercise and the other group were told nothing.

10:33And four weeks later the group who had simply been told that their movement mattered had lost weight, their blood pressure had dropped by 10%, their waist to hip ratio had improved. But nothing else had changed. Not their diet, not their workload, not their hours. It was just their perception of themselves, of their movement. And that to me shows just how powerful our mind can be. Just the story they were telling about what their body was doing and whether it counted. So nothing changed apart from the perception and the story that they told themselves. And I remember thinking in this moment, this is exactly what I've been trying to verbalise.

11:14This is exactly what I've been trying to say. This is how I think a lot of us can miss these health conversations. Like our bodies are listening to what we're thinking about ourselves. And if that's true for movement on the perception of how we exercise, imagine what your internal narrative is doing to everything else. Then I was found out a very similar study from an amazing woman called Leah Crum. And she always looks at the perception of stress and how our mind interprets information and how we perceive situations. So she took two groups and she gave them two identical milkshakes. They both had 380 calories in each.

11:53One group was told that the milkshake was rich and indulgent and it was a treat. And the other group was told that it was a sensible, low calorie, like the responsible choice that most of us will probably sway to, especially if we're listening to this podcast. The calories, however, were actually exactly the same, but they didn't know that. The hormonal response of both of these groups were totally different. The people who believed they were drinking something indulgent felt fuller and their hunger hormone dropped. And the people who thought that they were being more balanced, do I want to say, kind of more healthy, they stayed hungry.

12:31But both of these drinks had exactly the same calories, but people's bodies and their hunger hormones responded totally differently. So it shows that our hunger pathways aren't just activated by food, they're also massively susceptible to our thoughts, which means if you eat a salad whilst telling yourself that it's boring and unsatisfying, your body will probably believe you. But if you eat the thing that you love, slowly, without that side of guilt, which a lot of us can feel, that was me with the pizza, then your body might just handle it better than you think. And that is such a missing part of this like optimized conversation that we all live in.

13:12Like why aren't we optimizing our thoughts? What does self-compassion actually do? The way I like to think about it is when we offer ourselves kindness instead of criticism, it triggers real physiological change. Oxytocin is released, the same bonding hormone activated in supportive human connection, instead of being locked in a stress response, high cortisol, body in fight or flight, digest and compromise, hunger signals distorted, we actually create space for our bodies to relax, to restore, to function as they were designed to. And from that place, we actually can make better choices, not because we're like forced into doing it, which is what self-criticism can do.

13:58And not because we were disciplined enough, but ironically, because we felt safe enough. And so self-compassion, although it can sometimes be distorted as a soft option, it's the most evidence-based thing I believe I can tell you to actually do for your health. And the wellness industry will not tell you this. It needs you to believe that you are one program away, one supplement away, one January away from being well. But you have to remember, which I have to remember, you are not a protocol to be optimized. You're a person and you've always deserved to be treated like one. So healthy really shouldn't be this hard and it doesn't have to be because the place to start is with yourself.

14:51It felt best to leave you with a quote and a tool or two that you can take with you and this one quote was from Carl Rogers and it really captured so much about like what I was trying to write about in this book that, by the way, let's plug it, 28th of May, it's coming out, pre-order. But I remember seeing this quote and it really stuck with me. The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. I feel like there's so much power in that. It's so easy to disconnect from actually how we see ourselves, but sometimes that's like the most vulnerable, motivating thing that we can do.

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16:17Over nine in 10 reported more restful sleep. Grounded is launching very soon and you can shop both at diome.co. That's D-I-O-M-E dot co. Use code Sarah20 for 20 % off, whether you're buying once or subscribing. I attended TED earlier this year and I found myself in conversations with the founders of No Watch. You've probably seen me wear something on my wrist and lots of you have messaged me asking me what this is. It looks like a classic watch but it's actually quietly tracking something much more meaningful, your autonomic nervous system. This is the system that governs everything from how you respond, from excitement to anxiety, calm to overwhelm.

16:56Most wearables just give you a score but if you're anything like me that score can sometimes make you feel worse, like you're already behind before your day even begins. No watch works differently. There is no judgment and there is no dopamine chasing dashboard. It simply reflects what your body is already experiencing and also helps you notice what it might be missing. It gives you minute by minute timeline of your stress responses and your recovery. The recovery is the most important part and it's the part that no one talks about and it is often the most revealing marker of our long-term health.

17:29In just five days it calibrates your body and it builds your personal health fingerprint. You can try for free now for 30 days and if you use the code LWBW you can also get 15 % off. If you want to understand your body not just through performance but through self-awareness then this is where I'd begin.

17:50I'm going to start off with something where you can test your self-compassion levels. it's a little bit of an insight from my book so amazing researchers like dr kirsten neff they've all completed the self-compassionate scores and things that you can go on and rate your self-compassion on a scale but very often we can lie about what we really feel about ourselves we're not that honest about how we feel about ourselves and also can feel sometimes quite confronting. So I wanted to come up with a new way of testing how we see ourselves. And I think probably every one of you guys has a phone that is listening to Live Well Be Well.

18:31And so this felt like the most maybe new era way of testing it. So I came up with something called the selfie test. And I did this because how many times have you taken a picture of yourself or someone's taking a picture of you and you've looked at it and you've gone, oh, I hate that picture. we all have done it I'm sure if you haven't then like tell me what your tool is for that because I think we all see ourselves in not the best light I know I especially do and normally we'll be like there's another picture I need to take there's another picture I need to take and actually that is your self-compassion score so I want you to do this like if you're driving don't do this but do this next time you go to take a picture so the first thing I want you to do is take a selfie and I just want you to take one.

19:16So there's not 10 to 15 pictures for you to get the one that you really love. I want you to just take one. I want you to look at it and I want you to write down exactly what you think and feel. And the most critical component of this is that you need to be honest because I already know what most of you might write. The angle, the skin, the bags under my eyes, like all of these like negative connotations of how we might see ourselves. you might also write, well, I look pretty good today. Like, think I'm doing all right. Looking pretty trim. Maybe you might write some like really positive things.

19:54And this is the most important. Like, just write down exactly what comes to your mind when you look at that picture. And now what I want you to do is imagine that that picture that you just took is of someone you love. Maybe like your best friend, maybe your partner, but someone that you love. And then I want you to look and think, what do I now see from that picture? Because of course, you may not see the same things that you'd see when you look at yourself, because you're not constantly scanning for all of the flaws, the things that aren't perfect in that picture. And that's like such an interesting comparison to see why are we so willing to extend grace and acceptance and like the positives to people that we love but not ourselves.

20:41We've all been trained by an industry, by a lifetime of before and after images, by every mirror placed at the entrance of a gym. I don't know why they do that. To see ourselves as a problem to be fixed or optimized. And the thing that's really helpful about that exercise is it's not just in that moment that we see that. We're having that like inner dialogue run when, not just when we're looking at pictures, but when we're eating, when we're getting dressed, when we walk into a room and people are looking at us, when you're lying awake at 2am and replaying the day. The gap between what you wrote about yourself and what you said about your friend, that's the work to do, I believe.

21:25The understanding of that internal mechanism is so important, but most of us are like pretty unconscious about it. So to help with that work, I'm going to make you do something that feels really unbearable. But I think it's really important. You look in the mirror in your own eyes and you say three things out loud about yourself. And if that feels unbearable, then good. That is your cringe. Lean into the cringe. That's exactly where you need to go. And I don't know, you'll hear a lot of people in the optimization culture and the productivity culture talk about going into the uncomfortableness.

22:01This is the uncomfortableness that you need to step into with yourself because I'm pretty sure that you could say three good things to your best friend. So that's the first one. The second one to lead on from this is something that I call map. Now Robin Schwama, who's been on the podcast, built his mornings around meditation, visualization and prayer and it's nothing to do with religion it's all to do with intention and also just having that time for yourself and I wanted to create something quite similar but surrounding meals and surrounding your nutrition because presence is sadly what is missing and most of us see and I felt that even more recently like when I went to Japan the amount of time and precision that they take around food and around meals and creating the space and presence is so beautiful.

22:56And so I feel like it connected more to this than ever before, which is why I wanted to share it with you. What does MAP stand for? So MAP stands for mindfulness, appreciation and presence. Before your next meal, put down your phone, take one deep, slow breath and first just like notice how you feel in your body. So your shoulders high, is your stomach clenched? Do you have a headache? All of these things that try and acknowledge what's in your body. And then acknowledge everything that went into the food that's in front of you. So from the soil, to the people that harvested it, to the time, all of that is appreciation.

23:33Like we don't tend to think about that. And then just for 10 seconds, just be there, like be in that moment, be present because so often we're mindless when we're eating then you take your first bite and then the thing I love about this afterwards is that you can turn some of the gratitude inwards and then after map once you kind of scented yourself just before you eat and this feels like a lot but it's not it's so small it's going to take you like 20 seconds to do it is something that I love, which is, again, this is not religious, but it's called a self-compassionate prayer. And this is just like one or two lines that you silently say to yourself before you eat.

24:19Now, I find this really interesting because I didn't grow up religious saying grace around the table, but we know how much gratitude impacts our well-being. You might have heard things like the Gratitude Journal, or Tim Ferriss talks about that a lot, or saying something like three grateful things a day to help set yourself on a positive intention but like we never direct it towards health which is interesting and as we know how much our thoughts influence our digestion and our metabolism and how we think before we eat like how powerful could a self-compassion prayer of saying something grateful and intentional towards yourself affect how you metabolize that food.

25:02Interesting thought. And so you can just say one or two lines before you eat on a self-compassionate prayer, on a self-compassionate intention, if the prayer sounds too much, about you. Like you made it to the end of the day and like that's great because sometimes they have really hard days. Like allow yourself to acknowledge like something that's very compassionate about what you did today or how you acted or how you feel because we never really get to hear the positives and there's so much interesting research that shows that you need between three and five positive comments to balance a negative comment and because we have so many negative comments running all through the day this is your time to try and like direct a positive one and these moments I think are more critical than a lot of us realize.

25:54So map your meals with a self-compassionate prayer or a self-compassionate intention is a really positive way. And I talk about this a lot in the book, that you can start putting these techniques and tools in to start creating a more self-compassionate landscape with your health and yourself. So this is something that I find really interesting when we look at something I call the wellness disconnect. And I say that because I think the wellbeing industry and the wellness industry has kind of blown up so much in the last 10 years. And ultimately, we've always wanted to live longer, to live happier, to live weller.

26:33But it kind of, it's become a little bit confused along the way, shall I say. And the reason why I'm saying that is because now we're sold these like endless solutions, but we aren't feeling better. And the stats show that. And as I said at the beginning, you know,$8.5 trillion wellness industry, the reflections of the stats aren't showing that we're getting healthier. We're just not dying from infectious diseases when that's down due to medicine, not to the lifestyles that we're leading. And I was thinking about this and I want to read a little bit from the book for you guys about diets and about dieting and about why diets fail.

27:10And it made me wonder, is this constant inner criticism a modern affliction? So I'll let you down a rabbit hole. And here we go. So I read the Substack by a guy called Michael Easter. And he was looking at the history of dieting. And in there, they traced the diet culture back to 1863, when a man named William Banting published what's widely considered to be the first popular diet book. After writing a list of foods that he could and couldn't eat to manage his weight, he turned it into a pamphlet called Letter of Corpulence, addressed to the public, essentially a low-carb manifesto, and it was an instant hit.

27:55And just like that, the modern diet industry was born. Bitter analysed more than 400 diet books and discovered that what made the diet books so successful wasn't the food, but the stories that those rules were wrapped in. Now think about how you think about your diet and your health regime. What story is it that you tell yourself? Because I find that part so fascinating that actually a lot of the things that we connect to within health is also very much related to our identity. So for instance, the identity that I'm eating at pizza every night is not the identity that I've always portrayed. And I find this really interesting because when we look at different diets, maybe I'll just explain a few to you.