Why diets don’t work…

An alien from Mars armed with a basic grounding of English could easily assume that dieting is very popular. It’s all the rage- people do it all the time and everyone is talking about it. Dieting is so popular that in the past 10 years it’s estimated around 70% of the adult female population and 30% of males have been on one.
Whether it’s Atkins, cabbage or purple, people will try almost anything in their desire to shed a few pounds.

Unfortunately, the results are usually the same. Though 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?

Most diets involve a significant change to a person’s normal eating habits over an extended period of time, and this is the tricky bit. As they say, old habits die hard- and we cling to them because they fit in with our lifestyle and the people around us. And changing something that is second nature very often results in stress – especially if that change is at odds with the habits of those in our social and family world.

People who lose weight and keep it off are those who make permanent changes to their own eating and exercise habits, and to those of their families. If you let those old eating habits creep back in, no matter how much weight has been lost, in time you can find yourself back at square one.

In a world full of temptations, it’s praiseworthy to want to be a healthy weight and to manage your eating. But dieting as we know it is not necessarily the way to do it. For effective long-term weight loss, many habits – not just those of a nutritional persuasion, have to change…starting with an appreciation of the role of appetite, after which you can learn how best to control it.