94. What Diets Cause Yo-Yo Dieting? And How to Stop it Once and For All

If you have been waiting for a sign to start 2026 feeling strong, confident and actually in control of your body again, this is it. The New Year Reset program is back and this year it's bigger and better than ever. Last year it was four weeks. This year it's eight weeks, eight live coaching calls, deep dive support, and you get lifetime access to my full Breakthrough program. All for the exact same price as last year. Why am I doing this? Because I do not want there to be a single reason you don't hit your body goals this year while still living a full, real busy life. If you're ready to get a custom plan, real support and results that actually last, go grab your spot now. Seriously, pause this episode and go over and join the New Year Reset program with me. Head to mindinmymacros.com/restant or scroll on down to the show notes and I'll link it for you there. All right, let's get into the episode. Hey, I have a free live class coming up and I know you're going to want in on it. That's right. For the first time in two years, I'm hosting a free live class. So if you feel stuck constantly dieting to lose weight and to keep it off, or maybe you aren't even able to lose weight no matter how hard you try, or maybe you feel like there's no way you can eat more and not gain weight, it's time to stop spinning your wheels and finally learn a proven science backed approach that has helped over 1200 of my clients completely transform their bodies while enjoying life. Join me for the Fat Loss Formula, a live free class I'm hosting where I'll teach you how to lose body fat, build muscle and optimize your metabolism without ever yo yo dieting again. Inside this 60 minute live session, you're going to learn the biggest mistakes keeping you from losing fat and how to fix them. My proven two step formula for sustainable fat loss and muscle growth and four metabolism strategies you need to stop feeling stuck. Plus you're going to get a chance live at the end to ask me questions. Yep, I'm doing a live Q and A. This is the exact method I use with my clients and now I'm sharing it with you for free. But there are only three opportunities to join me live, so don't wait. Go grab your seat now at mindinmymacros.com fatlossformula or or click the link below in the show notes. Again, that's mindinmymacros.com fatlossformula Grab your seat and I'll see you there. Now let's jump into the episode.

Welcome to the Mind and My Wellness Podcast, your podcast for all things macros, movement, mindset, and everything in between. I'm your host, Dani Merenberg, an ex yo yo dieting cardio junkie turned sustainable nutrition coach who's helped over 1000 women feel confident in their skin by learning.

How to eat for their goals without.

Sacrificing a life well lived. I created the Mind and My Wellness Podcast to give you simple, effective, and manageable tips you can take away from each episode and implement in your daily life to look and feel like the best version of you. Each week, my guests and I teach you the secrets to mastering your health and owning your power. Nutrition, mindset, movement, and women's health are all topics you'll find here. Think of our time together as your productive little health break from the day. So grab your headphones, fill up your water, and let's dive into today's episode.

Welcome back to another episode of the Mind and My Wellness Podcast. This is Dani, and this morning I've got my matcha. I'm feeling so good. I am such a morning person. I've always been a morning person. If you have been with me from my OG days, you knew that I would get up so dang early, almost too early to go to the gym in the morning, because that was like, the time that I felt like it was my me time. Get up, go to the gym, start my day. Great. Well, now, since having Blakely, my mornings are totally different. I am sleeping as long as I possibly can until she wakes up, which is between 6 and 7am and that to me, if, like, old Danny was listening to me now, I'd be like, girl, you're slacking. And I'm like, no, I love that sleep. But I still love my mornings. I still feel my most productive in the mornings. So, anyway, I'm excited for this episode because it's on a topic that I think we can all really relate to. And it happened yesterday when I had an introductory call with a potential client who's looking for support with her nutrition. And she was talking all about how she's done keto multiple times in the past, and it's worked. She lost the weight that she wanted every single time she's done keto, but she'd always gain that weight back. So my question to her was, well, that's great. Did it actually work? Did keto actually work for you? Then if you were gaining the weight back. If you can't keep the weight off, does that diet actually work for you? And she paused for a moment and she said, well, no, I guess it didn't work. That's probably why I'm here. And then I asked her why she thought it didn't work. And she told me the very same thing I hear from every single woman I have the privilege of working with. And that was that it wasn't sustainable. It wasn't something that she could keep up with day over day over day, week over week, year over year. She didn't want to cut out the foods that she had to with her keto diet to lose that weight forever. She felt stuck. She felt like it was either that she could eat these foods and never have the body she wanted, or she could never touch those foods ever again. And that was the only way that she could have that body. Now, this is just one example of a diet that can potentially lead to yo yo dieting, which is where you lose weight to gain it back again. And you never seem to get out of this cycle. You lose weight, you gain it back, you lose weight, you gain it back, and then maybe you gain a little bit more back. And it feels like this vicious cycle that you can never get out of. So you're constantly dieting over and over and over again. But the good news is that you can stop that cycle. You can work with your metabolism and lose weight for good. And it just takes the right plan and strategies. And guess what? It doesn't have to mean that you're overhauling your whole entire life, but instead, just incorporating your plan and these strategies into a routine that feels good for you and feels like something that you can keep up with day over day, week over week, year over year, without feeling like you have to give anything up. So if you're listening to this, like, yes, please tell me more. I need this. I want you to pause this episode right now and go sign up for my free live training I'm hosting next week. And if you're listening to this episode, after I've already done the trainings, I still want you to pause this episode and go jump over to mindandmymacros.com fat loss formula to join the wait list for the next time I run these free live trainings because it will be that missing piece. You need to move beyond this cycle of dieting and see lasting results. Okay? I promise you, you don't want to sleep on this training because I paint out the full formula for this method in a much longer format, one more in depth than I can do in a 15 to 20 minute podcast episode. So jump over to that link, I'll post it down in the show notes. But definitely go sign up for that training because it'll paint all of the picture for you. But anyway, this conversation that I had with her yesterday really had me thinking about how certain diets can lead to this vicious yo yo dieting cycle and this perpetual feeling of always needing to be in a diet to lose weight, to see progress. Or if you're not in diet, you're not seeing progress. And that's not true at all. So what diets actually lead to yo yo dieting? The truth is that any diet that causes you to restrict can lead to yo yo dieting. Whether that's restricting certain foods or food groups, too many calories in general, you name it. Anytime you feel like it's not something you can do long term, it can lead to yo yo dieting. Any diet that feels like it's leaving you deprived, like you're hungry, moody, tired, fatigued, burnt out, or just can't wait for it to be over, but then you have no idea what to do after. So then you still try to eat low calorie. Is this resonating with you? Yeah, any of these can lead to yo yo dieting. And I've had plenty of clients who couldn't persist with diets like Whole 30 Low Carb Paleo. And this doesn't mean that they failed. This doesn't mean that they didn't have the willpower, quote unquote, to like keep going and see results. This means that that diet didn't work for them. The diet actually failed them because it wasn't something they could do long term. And this doesn't mean that you failed. It means that it wasn't sustainable. And something that's not sustainable for you is not going to lead to long term results. So I want you to think back to any diet that hasn't worked for you before. Does this hold true? Was this diet something that you felt like you could do forever and ever without it ever feeling like you weren't fully living your life as well? If you answered no, that you didn't feel like you could fully live your life in conjunction with your diet and fully enjoy holidays, go on vacation, have nights out, et cetera, then it wasn't the right diet for you? So what actually leads to the yo yo dieting part that causes weight gain to always come back? It is this concept of metabolic adaptation. And again, I'm gonna go into detail in this, in the training, but metabolic adaptation is essentially when your metabolism downregulates to meet your caloric intake. And it's really, really, really hard if you don't have the proper strategies in place to rebuild your metabolism. So. So if you are constantly dieting over and over and over again, your metabolism is going to downregulate, AKA it's gonna slow down and it's gonna meet that caloric intake. But there's something that you can do to fix this. There's something you can do to rebuild your metabolism, and that is a reverse diet. If you've been around the block with me, you know what a reverse diet is. But if this is new to you, I'm so glad you're here and I'm.

So glad you're listening to this, because.

A reverse diet is the key piece that you need after any dieting period or if you've been just living in a constant chronic diet again, pause this episode. Go sign up for my free training. If this is something you're like, please tell me more, go sign up. But a reverse diet is an amazing tool, and it is the tool that isn't utilized by 95% of women who diet. And it's that missing piece. It's that piece that constantly keeps you in that yo yo dieting cycle along with a diet that's not sustainable. But we can fix this by building a lifestyle that isn't in total divergence from your current lifestyle, but one with small tweaks that can lead to consistency and long term body change. And this isn't just about body change too. This is about total health change. Not only will you notice that you're having changes in your body, but you're going to notice a huge difference in your energy levels, your mental clarity, hormonal issues that you may be struggling with, gut issues, all of it. You name it. So I want to share my own personal story here too, because I can personally relate to this. I was the girl who was jumping from one diet to the next diet to the next diet every single time a diet wasn't working. And I would either chalk it up to, okay, it must be the diet. It must be this specific diet isn't the golden ticket that's going to work for my body. But at the same time, I was also part of that problem because I would be, quote, unquote, good throughout the week. The weekend would come around. I would either tell myself, wow, Danny, you were so, so on it this week. You ate your 1200 calories, you didn't eat sugar, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Did all those things. You deserve a day where you can eat what you want. Well, that day would then spiral me into this all or nothing mentality around food where I just all of a sudden was like, well, everything that I worked so hard for this past week was just thrown out the window because I allowed myself to eat this croissant for breakfast. But then that croissant led me to saying, well, what the hell, let me just eat this carrot cake after my lunch. And then I was like, okay, well, now this whole day is shot, so let me just shoot myself this day and just completely go off the rails. And that was the mentality that I had. And I was constantly stuck in. And it was not a healthy relationship that I was building with my body, with food. And it was constantly keeping me in this yo yo dieting cycle where I'd go off the rails, I'd try to come back and be good, and then I'd burn out, and I'd burn completely out. And that's when I was like, okay, this diet's just not working. Let me jump to another diet. Let me do the whole 30. Great. I feel really good. This is working for two weeks. And then boom, after that two weeks, it didn't work for me. Why? Because I wanted carbohydrates, I wanted to have rice with my meal. I wanted foods that were not allowed on that diet. And it wasn't a me problem. It was that diet did not work for me. It was that that diet was not sustainable for me long term. And sure, you can see great results by doing a Whole30 for 30 days. Absolutely. I love the basis of Whole30. And I don't want to just completely like poop on all of these diets. I think that a lot of these diets come from a place of wanting to provide some sort of structure where you can prioritize protein or eat whole foods. And there are great aspects about all of these diets. But when you take a diet to an extreme where you are either cutting out certain foods or food groups altogether, or you are being really restrictive with overall calorie intake, this is the problem. This is what leads to the yo yo dieting. Because it's not something that most people and most women can do long term. And if we try to do it long term, we see the negative impact that it has across other areas of our life. Whether that's socially, which in my opinion is a huge part of health as well. There's A huge part of having community and being a part of a community, that is health. There's also the mental aspect where if you're beating yourself up and you're talking down to yourself, if you do stray from your plan that is impacting your mental health, which is a huge part of your health. So health is not just what you're putting in your body, it's the thoughts that you're having, it's the actions that you're taking. All of this is total health. And in my opinion, we want to have this optimal health, which is all of these different avenues of health being at their optimal state. And this is where we feel our best. And the great news is, is that with a proper plan and strategies in place that don't completely derail from your current lifestyle, it is possible. So if you relate to any of this episode so far, my story, the story of the potential client that I had yesterday, I just want you to know there's a much better and science based approach to looking the way you want to look while also feeling the way you want to feel. It's about prioritizing these two things, your metabolism and your hormones. And you can do that with a proper macro and dieting plan. One that doesn't have you dieting all year round, but has you entering structured dieting phases, followed by a reverse dieting phase and then a body recomposition phase. I don't know if you can tell I am so passionate about this because not only has it completely changed over 1200 women's lives of whom I've worked with, but it's personally changed my own life and I know that it can change yours too. So if you're listening to this and you want to know more, go sign up for my training or go sign up for the wait list to listen to my training. The next time I have it, which hopefully will be very soon, I'll head over to mindandmymacros.com Fatloss Formula sign up. It's totally free. There's also a Q and A session at the end, so if you have any questions we can chat about it live, which I love, love, love having these sessions. It's been quite a while since I've had one because I was pregnant and then gave birth and so I am so excited to join you live and teach you all about this and give you the strategies that you need to set yourself up to break away from yo yo dieting and actually see long term results in a way that feels good in your body. So if you liked this episode? Please share it with a friend. I promise you we're all in this together. The dieting culture that so many of us grew up in has such a chokehold on us, but it doesn't have to be that way. And I'm making it my life mission to teach this to women so they know a better way. And I have so many success stories. If you are like, please, I need an example, head over to my Instagram at Mind in my macros. I have some highlights on my page that you can go through in the TMA highlight, which is my coaching program as well as the clients highlight filter. Through those, I share a bunch of examples of how women have gone through these different structured phases as well as paired a proper macro plan for them to Oftentimes they're like, whoa, I'm eating way more than I have been in my past diets. Are you sure this is gonna work? And you can see for yourself the results there. So thank you for tuning into this episode again. I hope I see you in my free training and until next week, keep Mind in your wellness.

Thanks so much for tuning in to today's episode. I love hearing from you, so shoot me a DM over on Instagram Instagram @mindandmymacros to keep the convo going. If you've learned anything from this episode or any of my past episodes, I'd really love it if you took a few seconds to leave a quick rating and review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. I love hearing what you've learned or what you've taken away from any of these episodes. It means so much to me when you do that. And if you have any friends you know that need a little help kicking some old dieting mentalities to the curb and want some simple, effective and sustainable tips to feel their best, share a link to this episode with them. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next time.