Why Diets Don’t Work
Dieting became so popular that in the past 10 years it’s estimated that around 70% of the adult female population and 30% of all adult males have been on one.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s the Atkins diet or liquid diets, people will try almost anything in their frantic desire to shed a few pounds.
Unfortunately, the results are usually the same. Although diets do produce results in the short term, very few dieters maintain their weight loss, no matter which diet they try.
Worse than this, most dieters end up bigger than they were before they started dieting. So, why don’t diets work?
After a lifetime of dieting failures, author Mary Ann MacKay finally lost over 150 pounds and has kept it off for over 5 years by making healthier lifestyle choices. Mary Ann MacKay coaches people who are tired of constantly dieting to lose weight on how to transition from their current eating, exercise and lifestyle habits to ones that support their health and weight loss goals.
Defining a Conventional Diet
Before we talk about the solution, let’s take a quick look at the problem. Conventional diets are those that seek to solve problems with obesity via calorie reduction, sometimes by itself, and sometimes paired with exercise. These diets often come with offers of pre-packaged convenience meals. Sometimes they come with bottles of pills and jars of powder designed to “flush” the fat. Often, they are peddled by movie stars and marketing gurus; thus the terminology “celebrity diet” has become popular. While creators of these diets may sometimes be well-intentioned, in most cases, they want nothing more than to increase their bottom line. They don’t mind if you gain the weight back; this must means you’ll be back for more of whatever it is they have to offer.
Why Celebrity Diets, Fad Diets, and Conventional Diet Programs Don’t Work
While offering a solution to the problem of obesity, these programs do not generally offer any means of addressing the many underlying reasons so many people suffer from them. If you keep getting flat tires when driving down a certain sector of roadway, you’ve got to get those tires fixed or even buy new tires. You can bet that finding out what’s causing those tires to run flat is a priority; so, you go back to the place where the problems have been happening and find that a construction company consistently drops nails in the road, causing commuters to get flat tires. Voila – problem solved.
Wouldn’t it make sense to find out why you are experiencing problems with your weight? What underlying problems are causing you to gain weight? Here are some common underlying problems:
- Emotional problems, even mild ones, can cause us to use emotional eating as a crutch. Do you use food as a bandage for hurt feelings? Many people do; if you’re among them, you are certainly not alone.
- Sugar Addiction is a huge problem, even for people who think they are eating a healthy diet. To make matters worse, many “diet” foods contain added sugars that do nothing to end the sugar addiction problem.
- Focusing on Fast Weight Loss instead of Lifestyle Change makes most diet programs completely unsustainable over a lifetime. Purveyors of fad diets and celebrity diets don’t care how healthy you are; they don’t care if you experience a lifetime of health and well-being. Very few conventional diets focus on permanent change.
What is the best way to achieve lasting weight loss? Leave those diet plans behind. Forget about them. Focus on making small changes, cleansing toxins from your body, and replacing unhealthy habits with habits that will transform your body and your life forever. Sure, these things take time; but, most of the best things in life do. Learn more about the way your body works and do what is best for it. In the long run, you’ll achieve a healthy weight and be happier, too.
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