There are lots of things that can side track your diet:
- Stress
- Lack of sleep
- Being sedentary and/or not exercising enough
- Not balancing caloric intake with expenditure
- Time constraints
- Food environment
- Being overly restrictive
- Social engagements
Those are just a few of the more common ones I know everyone struggles with.
However there is one pattern I notice happen time and time again with clients and myself that can also take us away from our optimal diet.
It is something I like to call “diet creep.”
What is diet creep?
It’s when we stretch the limits of our diet to see how much “we can get away with” in an unconscious manner.
To make things clearer let me use an example.
We all for one reason or another get on a kick to clean up our diet a few times a year, but why? What happened over the past few months that caused us to need to clean up our diets?
DIET CREEP!
A few months ago you were likely putting a lot of effort into making sure you were eating in a way that best served your goals.
You may have completely eliminated all processed foods. Removed all calorie-containing beverages. Stopped or severely cut back on the amount of alcohol you were drinking. You were tracking your food intake, weighing and measuring everything, and making sure you hit your protein goal. You were not finishing the last bit of food on your kids plates. You were eating till you were about 80% full.
Overall you were putting in a fair amount of effort to make sure your diet was on point for whatever your goal would have been at the time.
And if you were doing these things consistently you might have even seen this effort pay off and made some pretty significant changes.
Then you became comfortable with where you were and decided the level you were putting in was not necessary anymore. So you stop tracking all the time. You have the occasional drink on the weekend. You paid less attention to how full you were. You started doing less meal prep. Instead of cooking all your meals at home you end up going out to eat a bit more. You started going to the cupboard more to grab a quick bite of something when you weren’t hungry.
At first, probably for the first few months, you don’t really notice any different. You feel, look, and perform pretty much the same.
However after a couple of months things progress and maybe you notice the scale is up a few pounds, your clothes are fitting differently, your sleep is a bit off, and your cravings for certain foods return.
How many of you can relate to this pattern? 🙋
We are unintentionally drifting away from our optimal diet and the main reason for this is becoming more relaxed about the rigidness of our diet and perhaps eliminating some of the oversights we had in place to keep our diet optimal.
The question I think people have is “How do I prevent this diet creep?”
I personally don’t think diet creep is necessarily a bad thing.
When I talk about diet creep I am not talking about that resulting in weight swings of 30-50 lbs here, I am talking about a weight swing of 3-10% of your starting weight.
It is also important to keep in mind that your weight fluctuation needs to be consistently different by 3-10%, because as we know you can change your weight acutely by 3-10% very easily by eating or drinking more or less.
Now back to the question of how to prevent diet creep and why I don’t think it is a bad thing…
The reason I don’t think it’s a bad thing is because most people don’t need to be so rigid or put in an extreme amount of effort into keeping their diet “perfect”. In fact I think that can be a bad thing and be worse than allowing some diet creep throughout the year.
What I see when people are too rigid with their diet is that they might be able to maintain their ideal weight for longer but the effort and rigidity to do so for so long without any deviation results in them going off the rails. Instead of a diet fluctuation of 3-10% we are talking about a weight fluctuation in terms of 20-30%. This is where you put on 20 or more pounds and end up back where you might have started or potentially put yourself in a worse position than where you started.
By allowing some diet creep from time to time it gives you a bit more room to enjoy yourself, enjoy more foods, enjoy more mental freedom, enjoy more social engagements. This amount of flexibility allows you to easily transition back into a bit more rigidity to bring yourself back to optimal because you haven’t been white knuckling it for an extremely long period of time.
I also think life offers seasons when diet creep will just happen naturally.
The perfect example of this is the winter/holiday season. With the vast amount of celebrations, yummy foods, and the fact you are covering more of your body lends itself to a time to allow a bit more flexibility in your diet.
There might be other times throughout the year that naturally lend itself to allowing some diet creep as well. For me personally I have a slew of family birthdays in the month of April, there are a lot of birthday cakes and celebrations. I don’t stress about this. I just enjoy the cake, meals out, and time with family and know that I can reign things back in once the celebrations are over that month.
So I don’t think diet creep is a bad thing, but we also don’t want to let diet creep result in the 20+ lb weight fluctuation. To make sure this doesn’t happen we need to keep some amount of self monitoring in place so we can see when diet creep is happening and decide when we need to bring back in the practices that will bring our diet back on track.
When our diet is optimal we are probably using many self monitoring tools to keep us on track. We might be measuring our food, taking body composition measurements, stepping on the scale everyday, taking pictures of ourselves, and using a “tight clothes test”. Doing all of these 365 days a year is obviously quite burdensome and adds a lot of stress. So maybe once we are happy with our diet we let some of the most burdensome ones drop off and we keep one or two in place so we can use those to make sure if/when diet creep happens we can catch it before it becomes too big of a problem.
For example, you might keep the tight clothes test and the body comp measurements in place since you only have to do those every few weeks but let the daily practices fall off since those are the most burdensome.
Diet creep is not a terrible thing, and I think we all deal with it from time to time throughout the year. In fact I think diet creep is important in maintaining an overall healthy diet because it allows us a more relaxed approach to eating that is important in maintaining a healthy mindset around food. It is important to not view diet creep as a failure but rather a natural occurrence as we tend to explore the boundaries of our diet and perhaps enjoy the seasons of life that include more indulgence than others. It allows us a happy medium between being overly rigid and the off the rails no hold bar way of eating the majority of the population finds itself in.
If you find yourself wanting to find a more healthy balanced diet that allows you to look, perform, and feel your best without feeling so restricted all the time subscribe to my newsletter using the form below and each week I will provide you with actionable information to help you reach your goals.