Why Diets Fails
The Solution for Permanent Weight Loss
Can you relate to the following scenario? You start a new diet and for the first few days you feel super motivated. You start to lose weight in the first days. You tell yourself “this time I am going to do this until the end.” You keep restricting food, rejecting your hunger cues, feeding yourself low-fat and low-carb, tracking your daily calories and do as much cardio as you can.
But then something unexpected happens. An unplanned dinner invitation or trip, getting sick you name it. The list of triggers to overeat or indulge is endless. And when it happens (and it probably it did to you) the next day you wake up feeling like a failure. The motivation starts to fade, and you tell yourself you going to lay off a few days of dieting. Life gets in the way and you start to fall off track again. You give up.
Why does this happen?
Let’s begin with the mindset. In the beginning its always easy to be motivated, because the novelty makes it exciting and interesting. You see sudden changes which keep you going. But eventually your life will start to interfere with that and then your mindset starts to change. You get very stressed by your job, relationships and so on. You start to focus more on the things around you then on your goal and your diet, so you let it slack behind.
You really have to commit to the diet and not only connect to the result of losing a certain amount of weight in a certain amount of time. The problem is that the goal of a diet is far away, which means you’re only connected to your imagination. What happens is that reality doesn’t catch up to your imagination fast enough. Then you’ll find an excuse to give up on your diet and your goal.
Why do Diets Fail?
Diets fail because they are contradictory. A diet demands you to fit instructions in your current lifestyle. That will never work. The approach should be working on building a new lifestyle and a new nutrition approach that is sustainable for your whole life. This will take some time and also some experimenting with different nutrition approaches.
Diets fail because they promise short-term success. Sounds good if you want to lose weight fast. But what happens when you are done dieting? Going back to old eating habits and gaining it back?
Nutrition starts with the mindset and the way you look at food. We don’t see food as something that keeps us alive anymore. The food industry and also the diet industry tells us otherwise. The food industry wants to sell us the tasty unhealthy food and consume food that comforts us. Many people don’t eat out of hunger, they eat out of emotion. Whether it is anger, sadness, loneliness or even depression. Eating fatty or sugary food will not make you happier, changing your habits and chasing your goals will.
The problem is that our understanding of the factors involved to get a sustainably healthy lifestyle are ignored for short-term results. A diet tries to reverse a lifetime of poor eating habits, caused by the wrong relationship with food. The pervasiveness of all these factors is the reason why people will be failing at diets. I hate to break it to you but there is no weight loss secret, no magic diet and no magic weight loss supplement.
The Solution
There are so many approaches to a healthy lifestyle and eating habits. You have to find the one that is sustainable to your lifestyle. The trick is it should not feel like an effort to you. You should not be hungry and thinking about food you can’t eat all the time. It all comes down to the right food choices and the right nutrition approach for your body type and life.
The next step is changing your mindset from the “all or nothing approach” to a more balanced way of thinking. Just because you ate one piece of cake doesn’t mean you were slacking or fell of track. It certainly doesn’t mean that now it doesn’t matter anymore, and you can binge on everything. One bad meal will not make you fat and one healthy meal will not make you lose weight. It is crucial to have a healthy balance to your nutrition.
Don’t think that healthy food has to be tasteless. There are many ways to create your favorite dishes in a healthy and lower calorie way you just have to educate yourself and take time to work on your lifestyle. Weight loss and a healthy relationship to food will not happen overnight. Give yourself time and take effort to change your life. If you need any help to find the right nutrition approach or ideas for healthy recipes feel free to contact me
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