Fast weight lost diets fall short in all ways. Many of us have learned to believe that when a diet doesn’t work, we have failed. However, it is the diet that has failed you.
Fast weight loss diets just don’t work. There are many reasons for this and many consequences to continuing to try diet after diet to lose weight. One of the main reasons why diets fall short is that a diet is temporary. Eventually the diet ends and then you return to eating all the foods you denied yourself on the diet, most likely causing the weight you lost to return.
You will need to diet again to lose the weight again. This can lead to a tragic cycle of chronic dieting that can last years and lead to increased emotional pain and decreased overall health. In addition, chronic dieting leads to patterns of disordered eating, a psychological illness.
Numerous studies of diets have shown that 95-97% of diets don’t work. Sure you may lose weight on fast weight loss diets but after the diet ends, you are likely to gain all that weight back again; and often more than you lost on the diet. When you diet, you restrict certain foods — foods that your body may actually want and need.
Therefore, your body goes into starvation mode, slows your metabolism and prepares for famine. When your diet ends, your body wants to put weight back on to prevent starvation in the future. In other words, your body is very good at keeping weight on and not so good at allowing you to diet it away.
Despite the belief that weight loss is healthy, chronic dieting that leads to weight loss and gain over and over is unhealthy for your body. Not only are you likely to gain more weight over time, much more than if you never dieted, but this cycle is hard on your body. Add in the below psychological consequences and this could lead you down a very unhealthy path.
Along with biological reasons for the failure of a diet are numerous psychological reasons and consequences.
Fast weight loss diets teach you to distrust yourself. When you diet, you stop listening to your body. You stop hearing the needs of your body, what it wants and needs to stay healthy. You start to listen to someone else tell you what is healthy and correct for your body. You begin to give your power of choice and listening to yourself up to another person whom you don’t know. When you crave something that isn’t on the diet, you learn to distrust you own body’s cues and instead trust another person. After enough time, you have little to no trust in yourself, your body, or ability to listen to yourself. This spreads to other areas of your life as well.
In addition, it is the restriction of a diet that leads you to start binging. Back to the biology of a diet; when your body believes it is in starvation mode, it will do whatever it takes to get what it needs: food. You begin to binge eat because of your body’s need to feed itself. After enough time on a diet, your binge self is out of control. You will find yourself bingeing whether or not you are on a diet. Even thinking about dieting may lead you to begin your binge. Pair this with a loss of the ability to trust yourself and to listen to your body and bingeing feels more and more out of control.
Dieting leads to disordered eating patterns. In addition to those which I have mentioned (distrust for self, inability to listen to your own body, weight gain, chronic dieting) you may develop increased thoughts about food, increased negative body image, decreased ability to follow through on dieting behaviors, increased pairing of physical appearance with lovability, increased feelings of failure and shame, obsessive body checking, and a host of other negative feelings and patterns. Eventually, the cycle of dieting and restricting, bingeing, weight gain and loss can leave you constantly thinking about food, and your body image. This is a terrible place to be.
In summary, dieting will fall short for you everytime. Dieting doesn’t work. The better option is to trust your body, to listen to it, to accept your body as it is, to question societies beliefs that health and weight loss go hand in hand as well as to question your own desire to lose weight to feel better about yourself (which will never work in the long run). This will lead you feeling much better about yourself inside and out despite your size.
0 Reader Comments Share your thoughts.