Imagine that you were about to go on a trans-continental flight. On this flight you had a fairly good chance of making it to your cruising altitude, but you only had between a one and five percent chance of getting to the other side. Before you clamber off the plane, think about this. The owners of this airline always blame the 95 to 99 percent of passengers who don’t make it – saying that they are weak willed, or didn’t comply with every aspect of the airline rules.
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That’s what the various diet programmes around offer you. Depending on what programme you go onto, you have a fairly good chance of losing a fair amount of weight; but only between one and five percent of people who go on a diet maintain their weight loss in the long term. To top it all, when you regain your weight after parting with your hard earned cash, they blame you for being weak willed or falling off the programme.
Why don’t diets work?
Well, for one thing, they cause you to obsess with the one thing that you are trying to avoid – food. When on a diet you are expected to plan out every aspect of what you will eat. What will you have for your next meal, how many calories will it contain, and how many grams of carrots can you have? (Oh … don’t forget to count those Pro-vita and snip the fat off that 30 g of steak).
You become so obsessed with food, you can barely think of anything else. On top of it all you are depriving yourself of calories, so you’re hungry irritable and obsessed with food. Crazy, isn’t it? It gets worse though. No diet allows the dieter to eat those foods that his/her body really craves. You know, those foods that, the more you get into your diet, the more you promise yourself you will treat yourself with when you reach your target weight.
As sure as night follows day, you will crack – you will binge – you will lay your hands on as much of your favourite food that you can and scoff the lot. Then, you feel bad, you feel like a failure, and chances are you will binge again – just to try and get rid of that bad feeling. See the vicious cycle setting in?
Well, don’t feel bad – it happens to 95 percent of other people who go on diets. You are not the failure – the diet is. The simple truth is this, in trial after trial, diets don’t work in maintaining a long term weight loss.
Some other reasons diets don’t work:
Diets rely on will power rather than addressing the underlying thoughts, feelings and emotions that underpin being overweight
Diets generally make you hand over control of a central part of your life to an external programme – all your thinking is done for you by the programme. This results in you losing touch with your body, with your hunger or lack there-of, and in your ability to manage one of your most basic needs.
Diets don’t really prepare you for being thin. Most overweight people have a number of unresolved issues concerning their personal image, their social role and their sexuality which may be frightening them out of being thin.
Many diets don’t encourage or teach exercise. Exercise is absolutely essential in maintaining weight loss. If you cut your calorie intake, your body responds (despite your being overweight) as though you were starving and as a survival instinct your metabolic rate drops. One way of stimulating your metabolic rate is through exercise.
Diets are dictatorial and the child in every one of us will rebel against the dictator at one time or another.
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