Maureen Bligh, Registered Dietitian
Maureen Bligh
About me:
Maureen Bligh is a registered dietitian and project manager for the Dairy Council of California. She manages online communication and social media efforts, an internal Nutrition Trends Team and develops online continuing education courses for health professionals.
Maureen's career in dietetics spans over 30 years and began in clinical dietetics and out-patient education at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA, where she provided nutrition education, focusing on diabetes education for children, pregnant women and adults. She has passion for providing reality-based, nutrition education to help people enjoy a wide variety of nutrient-rich foods to lead a healthy life and was delighted to recently discover that her commitment to family meals helped shape healthy eating habits for her two teenage sons.
Follow Maureen on Twitter: @MaurBligh_RD
Some friends of mine from Germany travelled to Iran last summer for a few weeks. While in Iran, they were not able to drink alcohol. These friends are very moderate drinkers and ordinarily do not crave alcohol. However, the entire time they were in Iran they were constantly thinking of alcohol and wanted a drink.
This same psychology holds true for dieting. Once you are on a diet and are restricted from eating certain foods, all you can think about is your next meal and the foods you are not allowing yourself to eat. Then the more you think about food, the more you want to eat and the more you eventually eat. This is the primary reason that dieting does not work.
In fact, Medicare did an analysis of 31 studies in 2007 in search of an effective treatment for obesity and found that dieting is a consistent predictor of weight gain, with up to two-thirds of dieters regaining more weight than they lost.
If someone has rigid rules for “healthy eating” that are disconnected to internal cues, they are more likely to succumb to overeating, as a consequence of breaking their well meaning rules. In addition, they are more likely to eat as a result of external triggers rather than hunger. External triggers include things such as time of day or when a certain program starts on television. They may also be more prone to eat for emotional issues such as coping with stress.
Several popular authors are making the case to abandon rigid dieting rules and learn to eat based on internal cues; examples include Intuitive Eating and Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle. They are talking about an entirely new approach to eating that does not eliminate entire food groups but rather is based on internal cues and diet diversity rather than a rigid list of “foods to include” and “foods to avoid”.
Learn more about this new approach by following our blog series, Positive Eating Approach.
Maureen Bligh
Registered Dietitian
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