What if discipline is BS?*

Dieting and the failure of cognitive restriction

‘I don’t understand, I was on a detox all week and my jeans are tighter now than a few days ago’ said my friend. I replied ‘I lived sugar-free for 2 months and reached my heaviest weight since 2006. Mainly because I over-indexed on nuts’. We laughed. Even if it wasn’t funny.

The more I live, the less I believe in discipline, at least as it's portrayed in popular culture. I'm referring to the type of discipline that has seeped into my psyche, and perhaps even yours. Willpower is discipline’s close cousin and best friend. Both are revered as the holy grail of success for any endeavour. Prime example below:

As far as I can see, discipline comes in two forms: cognitive restriction, i.e., forbidding yourself to do something, and cognitive coercion, i.e., forcing yourself to do something. I will discuss the former in today's piece.

I have two theories. The first one goes like this:

Applying cognitive restriction to something that is not within the realm of cognition (i.e., not fully controllable by your prefrontal cortex) is not only doomed to fail, but it’s also counterproductive and can even be harmful.

Dieting provides a prime example. Yes, this piece is about dieting—I may have introduced it with fancy neuroscience terms, but it's about food. Although it may seem superficial, dieting is far from a trivial subject. Nothing trivial grows into a 200-billion-dollar industry.*

For the longest time, I considered myself above diet. I tried one in 2003 when I was a teenager, led by a psychotic 'nutrition' doctor with dismal bedside manners. She put me on the same diet as her 50-year-old patients, dismissing the fact that my needs varied slightly from those of menopausal women: some sort of 'protein' diet. I hated it. I began developing strange compulsive behaviour around food. Frustration showed up in the most tragically comic ways. The worst part? I didn’t even need a diet—just a classic case of teenage dysmorphophobia.

Anyhow, I swore to never diet ever again in my life. Even when I put on 10kg in my first year studying in France. Even when my PT (whom I paid through the nose) said “Lina, you can’t outwork a bad diet”. I never believed in restricting my food intake. I decided I would go to my grave with a Nutella pot in one hand and a pizza slice in the other.

My last bout of dieting really snuck up on me. I did not see it coming. In 2020, while recovering from a glorious burnout, I noticed that eating bread made me drowsy in a cartoonesque way. I then realised that aggressive spikes and crashes in my blood glucose levels were likely causing most of my fatigue, so the whole thing was probably diet-related. I’d always needed more energy so I figured ‘if I fix my food intake, I’ll be energised, focused and sharp, like in the movies, and I can bounce back from this low state’.

So, 20 years later, the Pandora box of dieting opened again. I inhaled everything I could find on the glucose topic: Huberman’s podcast, Doctor Hyman's sugar detox series, documentaries proclaiming sugar as poison, and a slew of research about how sugar is a drug, how it's hidden everywhere, and how it's slowly killing me, etc… I brainwashed myself forgetting an important element of context: the research was based on people with an American-style diet, those who overdo it with carbs and takeout.

For those of you who know me, you might not be surprised to read that I went all in; I 'ramped up,' as I call it. I tend to see things in black and white when I decide something is a good (or a bad) idea. My husband's patience has been tested many times, and as he proofread this article, he complained, 'For two years, you berated all of us, and we had to go on these stupid sugar detoxes.' He's right. I have no idea why he puts up with my sh**.

Up until 6 years ago, I ate like an American teenager. Then I met someone who cooked and ate like a homo sapiens and picked up good habits. What I should have done was to stick with that, incorporate some greens and healthy proteins, and call it a day. Instead of which I did the most catastrophic form of cognitive restriction.

So, I tried not one, but two sugar detoxes. It was absolutely the worst. I felt like I wanted to peel the skin off my face. These attempts led to a 10% increase in my body weight. And I had never thought about food as much as I did during those two months when I tried to stop.

Over the past 20 years I had allowed myself the only thing that works: a low-guilt approach to eating, driven by joy and pleasure. And some compulsion on the low days. Because, yes, sometimes, yummy food is for comfort, it is a crutch. You can not take all the emotional crutches away at the same time. It might be ‘maladaptive’ as Huberman says from his Standford professorial chair. But, sometimes, you need what you need and it’s not perfect and it’s okay.

Here is the thing that none of these books, programmes, doctors and nutritionists, etc. tell you or try to solve. Food goes far beyond eating. Food at its very core is life, it’s culture, it’s biology and physiology. It’s also emotion, psychology and spirituality. It’s intricately baked into your subconscious with a myriad of memories and moments and feelings. It’s your summer by the beach. It’s a catch-up with friends over dinner. It’s your grandma showering you with love.

Food’s meaning goes well beyond anything our cognition could ever grasp, let alone control.

Yes, sugar acts like a drug, but it isn’t a drug. You don’t see 6-year-olds floating around snorting coke. But they like clementines and biscuits. Sugar doesn’t have the same impact on the reward systems as drugs*. So people need to chill on that mice experiment. It’s much more complicated than that.

The reality is that we don’t know much about how our mind interacts with our body*. We don’t know how food is metabolised or hormonal changes affect weight gain. We don’t know how our psycho-cognitive system reacts when we eat something with guilt versus when we eat it with joy. We don’t know how our body will react if we tell ourselves “I shouldn’t, this is sugar, it is poison, this is bad, tomorrow I’ll stop”. There is more research now. But it doesn’t mean we have more answers.

How many people do you know who have been trying to lose weight for years? That life of guilt, frustration, dissatisfaction, ambiguous relationship to food, compulsive eating, and shame. It’s everywhere around me recently, from my family to my colleagues, to myself.

This led to one absolute certainty: cognitive restriction does not work. It never has, and it never will. Eating with guilt is harmful to your body, mind, and soul. Discipline, when it comes to food, is absolute bullsh*t. You cannot address an issue that is beyond cognition with cognition.

I wanted to conclude with my second theory (you forgot didn’t you?). But I decided it was one worth keeping for next week.

Now - what’s the solution to this diet cul-de-sac? I’m not sure folks. I only have the beginning of an answer.

I think it's about normalising your relationship to any kind of food. Perhaps the trick is to re-engineer how you feel about it. They call that intuitive eating, but I haven't read anything about it. I'm trying to re-learn to eat with zero guilt. I have two quality meals; for the rest, all bets are off. And I try to listen to my body, as they say on woo-woo Instagram pages. And I enjoy every single bite.

Bon appetit and until next week,

Lina

*The title of the piece reads like a Cosmopolitan headline. It is an editorial choice that I take full responsibility for.

*Nothing trivial grows into a billion-dollar industry—be it dating apps, social media, and so on. It's all about the human condition, its desires, and its pains. Then, businesses emerge from the woodwork, striving to fix these issues and find solutions.

*According to research (don’t ask me which one please), the long-term success rate for sustained weight loss through dieting alone ranges from 5% to 20%. Which means the rate of failure is anywhere between 80% and 95%.

*I’m talking about dopamine. I’m no expert, but cocaine’s impact on dopamine release is incomparable to sugar.

*Caveat - this does not apply to people with severe food disorders.

*Although there is a fascinating milkshake experiment called ‘Mind over milkshakes: mindsets, not just nutrients, determine ghrelin response’ here

*Thank you to Fanny whose conversation helped me shape these thoughts.