Posted on January 16, 2015 by Jenny Cromack
Have you seen the three part Horizons ‘The Right Diet For You’ series on the BBC this week? I know many of our personal training clients have been speaking about it, so I’ve spent the last two nights catching up on it. Admittedly, I haven’t seen the final series but so far I think it’s been quite interesting to watch. For me, as a personal trainer, it’s definitely made me think about how certain people respond to clients.
As a personal training company, we have a nutritional plan which we give to all of our clients, however we are quite aware that there isn’t ‘one-glove’ fits all approach and therefore once we have given our nutritional plan to all of our personal training clients, if they are not getting the results they want we then give them a individualised plan which still follows the principles of our nutritional plan but is more specific to the individual, their lifestyle and their approach to food.
If you haven’t watched the programme then you can still take a quiz to find out what is the right diet for you. Have a go of the quiz and see what your results are. The quiz aims to ‘catregorise’ you as one of the following eaters:
* Feaster
* Grazer
* Emotional Eater
What did you come out as? Many of my personal training clients who have done the quiz have come out as a mixture, as did I, however many people will be a distinct ‘type’ of eater.
The aim of the research is to find out how certain behaviours and hormones affect the food choices people make and therefore what type of diet will suit them the best if they wish to lose weight. As a personal trainer it is really important for us to understand the psychological make up of our clients, and also gain a greater understanding of how hormones affect food choices rather than just assume a client isn’t losing weight just because they aren’t trying hard enough. Losing weight isn’t as simple as just looking at how the body responds to the food we eat, how many calories people are burning but also understanding how food choices are made.
I think that if you watch the programme or do the quiz we can all resonate with some of the questions or reasons why people make certain choices and therefore, if you are looking to lose weight I think there are tips/ideas you could take away from the programme to help with this.
If you came out as a clear ‘type’ of eater then, according to the researchers, these are the best diets for you:
* FEASTERS – High protein, low GI diet
* GRAZERS – Intermitten fasting diet
* EMOTIONAL EATERS – Group weight loss clubs (due to the support given by the ‘tutor’/other members of the group).
What I found interesting about this was that whilst the Grazers were asked to follow an intermitten fasting diet, they were also asked to pretty much cut out pasta, bread and focus on eating veg, meat, fish, eggs…..surely this is still a high protein, low GI diet, similar to what the Feasters were recommended to eat.
As a personal training company we highly recommend a high protein, low GI diet and achieve amazing results with our clients, so it was nice to hear this idea reinforced.
As a personal trainer, I could also relate to how the emotional eaters behaved. I run a weight loss group for one of our corporate clients and there are certainly some emotional eaters in this group who have achieved great success because of the support of others. However, I don’t think the emotional eaters do have to just work in a group environment, I think they just need support. So this might an individual working with a personal trainer who acts as the support group, or it might be an individual who decides to buddy up with a friend and do 1:2 personal training again to have the support of a friend and a personal trainer.
I think some of the experiments they have performed about behaviours towards food and food choices have been interesting but I also can see flaws in the experiment, for example some of the groups they have studied have been very small in numbers so how representative is this of society as a whole? Additionally, the programme doesn’t say how external factors have been controlled so these don’t have any impact on the choices made. But, despite these flaws I still think there is a lot of interesting information to be learned from.
At the moment I haven’t seen the end of the programme so I’m keen to watch it and see how well the groups have got on, but so far it has certainly given me ‘food for thought’ about whether there are any approaches we can use to optimise the success of our personal training clients.