How "Potentiation" can aid in your nutrition goals
I asked on my Instagram recently the following question;
“When considering starting a diet or adjusting your nutritional behaviors, are you more likely to”;
A. Eat the same foods but less of them and increase the risk of hunger.
OR
B. Eat different foods so as to be able to eat more of them and be satiated.
The majority of responses were overwhelmingly in favor of option A. and that surprised me (not because it is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply because I imagined that people felt how I felt which is more in favor of option B.)
Thinking about this again now, I can see how option A. might be the more popular option for a few reasons;
Control. You only have to control 1 thing, quantity, rather than the many things like changing your grocery list and working out how to cook, prep, and enjoy new options.
Logic. It makes logical sense. Less food, in general, equates to fewer calories.
Comfort. You don’t have to remove things you know you like. Deciding on whether to keep a nightly glass of wine/beer or favorite chocolate bar/cake etc. is not something most people want to face when their lives are just as stressful and demanding as they always have been.
I would however like to make a case for option B. So here goes.
Option B.
I’d be willing to bet good money that every person reading this has tried, struggled, and dropped a dietary protocol at some point? (feel free to email me here to gloat smugly if you have not.)
A significant contributor to this outcome is often that the protocol in question asks people to change too many variables at once. Namely both the type and amount of food it prescribes. This often leaves people shifting almost their entire dietary landscape to something completely new which is very hard to manage.
Switching from a standard western diet of higher sugar, more processed, and particularly palatable shelf-stable foods to less processed, lower added sugar, and more inconvenient to prepare foods is a BIG shift.
Now if I tell you that not only do I expect you to shift all that, but also to half the quantity of food I expect you to eat - then maybe throw a daily step-count expectation and a 4x weekly training routine in there and, well, you get the gist. Clusterfuck central.
Potentiation;
Potentiation, however, can help option B. become more suitable and aid us to make long-term changes easier to sustain and be more scalable.
In short, potentiation is the process of doing something now that will allow you to do the same thing better, more powerfully, and with less resistance/more ease later on (like a mixture of planning and practice).
By choosing option B. and focusing on changing just the quality/type of food you would eat first, and not focusing on the quantity at the same time, you are laying the road for a smoother diet in the future.
Fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, whole grains, and more healthful fats (mono/polyunsaturated) are the cornerstones of a healthful diet that power performance, aid recovery, and aid body composition changes. Don’t get me wrong, we can still overeat them, but it is much harder to do so.
Change too much and you can expect to dive into trouble.
By focusing on the quality/type of the food first, we can get used to and develop our palate of preferred foods we know we can rely on. Doing this for a few weeks or months before getting deep and dirty in the calorie balance and quantity scenario is, in my mind, an essential period of dietary success.
You potentiate your future success by planning and practicing with the types of foods you know you’ll be eating more of in a diet phase. Once you are in a diet phase, you can focus more of your attention on the quantity of food/activity you are doing to achieve the necessary calorie deficit needed to achieve your goals of weight loss.
Diving straight into trying to address food/calorie quantity is often a recipe for hunger, restriction, frustration, and eventual collapse of efforts. This is only amplified when you are having to also choose foods from a palette you don’t understand well or enjoy much yet.
Consider focusing on shifting adjusting the quality/type of foods you are consuming with the intention of seeing fat loss/body comp changes, and when it comes time to adjust the quantity and play the calorie balance game, you’ll be primed and ready.
