Diets Are Not The Answer

One thing you really shouldn't do if you want to lose weight permanently and effortlessly is go on a diet. Just don't do it! Apart from an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence that diets don’t actually work there is now concrete scientific proof that they don’t work.Now we're not talking about natural and balanced healthy eating plans here, which is ideal if you want to lose weight, we're talking about punitive, rigid, and unnatural diets which are almost impossible to stick with for longer than a couple of days and basically do more harm than good.

In research conducted by Traci Mann, associate professor of psychology at UCLA, 31 long term studies that followed people on a range of diets for between two and five years, were analyzed. Her study, recently published in the journal American Psychologist, concluded that most people would have been better off not dieting at all. Their weight remained virtually the same as when they started plus they had put their bodies through the damaging process of yo-yo dieting and, that's to say nothing of the mental deprivation suffered by individuals when following a 'diet'. [It all sounds pretty pointless when you look at the cold hard facts doesn't it?]

What’s even worse is that among those who were monitored for more than two years, 83% eventually put more weight back on than they had lost. One study showed that half of dieters weighed more than their starting weight five years after the diet!

It is great to have scientific proof but, from personal experience, I could have told you that dieting just makes you fat. It’s time to do something different. I’m sure you have heard the famous quote 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result' well isn’t that what we have all been doing?

Diets are really hard to stick to – you can’t expect to change your habits ,behavior and lifestyle and stick to strict dietary rules for an extended period. Apart from this being an unnatural way of eating and living, we tend to invoke our willpower to get us through the challenge. Unfortunately willpower is no match for years of subconscious conditioning and although it works for a short while failure is virtually guaranteed.

Diets cause you to feel hungry and deprived – when you can’t have something you tend to want it more. Diets create extreme cravings for the things that are forbidden on your diet making it almost impossible to stick to. To add to your problems, because you are eating a lot less than you are used to, you are likely to be suffering from real hunger – a feeling which is particularly difficult to overcome. This all causes stress and frankly makes you feel miserable. How many times have you been driven to giving up on a strict diet regime and dived straight into the cookie jar. This is simply a normal reaction to the deprivation of being on a strict diet. You never had a chance.

Diets are only temporary – if, by some miracle, you manage to stick to your diet for longer than a couple of weeks and actually lose the weight you wanted to, what happens when the diet is over. Yes you are supposed to sensibly maintain your new slim figure by eating a healthy balanced diet and exercising. Unfortunately nine times out of ten that is not what we do, we tend to reach our goal weight and then go on a six month binge to celebrate putting us right back where we started plus a few extra pounds.

Diets don’t take into account the psychological aspects of eating. We don’t just eat because were are hungry, if our eating patterns were OK and didn’t need to be addressed then we would probably already be thin! This is a major failing of the conventional diet. Habit is a habit and unless you address the behavior and the reasons that made you fat in the first place you will never succeed at weight control.

Diets – One size does not fit all. We are all very different, we have different cultures, personalities, preferences, lifestyles, upbringing, cooking abilities and so on. So how can a diet that someone else has written suit everyone who reads it. Weight loss is a personal thing.

Change your mind, change your weight, change your life

Ok, so if dieting doesn’t work what does. Well, we need to permanently change our attitude towards food, our eating habits, our behavior around food as well as becoming a bit more active. When it comes down to it, we need to change our beliefs and habits at a subconscious level so we can effect a long term lifestyle change without causing the deprivation and misery normally associated with dieting.

Diets fail on two different levels, the psychological and the physical. Conventional diets have always simply dealt with the physical aspect of reducing calories or cutting out particular food groups and that is why they only ever work in the short term. To lose weight successfully it is essential to take into account the psychological aspect of eating. People fail at dieting because it is exceptionally difficult to change eating behaviors through the use of willpower alone. Eating behavior comes from a complex fabric of emotions, beliefs, habits, early conditioning, lifestyle, culture, personal preference, season and geographical location, it is virtually impossible to suppress all of this with the power of your will alone.

Diets also don’t work on the physical level. The body is very efficient in adapting its metabolism to your new reduced calorie diet. The body effectively wants to hold on to its fat and if there is a sudden dearth of calories it will go into preservation mode making it more and more difficult to lose weight. This is why at the beginning of a diet it is easy to lose the weight, but as your body adjusts it becomes more and more difficult. It is at this point where most people give up and go on a binge because they have felt deprived of their favorite food for so long, and so what happens? You end up putting on more weight than you lost during those two tortuous weeks on that diet.

by Dianne R Maurer
Weight Loss Success Coach