Why diets don’t work

There isn’t a diet I haven’t tried over the years and I truly believe that they don’t work, not in the long run anyway. Diet is a temporary restriction of certain food groups that people turn to in order to lose weight thinking that they will be able to go on that diet for a long time and that the weight loss will be maintained. Unfortunately, no one can sustain restrictive programs for more than couple of weeks and yes, your kilos come back whether you like it not.

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Here are the main reasons diets don’t work:

1. Diets don’t last in the long run. You can cut out any food group from your diet and yes you will lose weight but research shows that in a matter of a year people get back to their previous weight if not earlier. The main reason is the psychology behind being on a restrictive program. The more you don’t allow yourself to eat a certain type of food, the more you want it. The moment you end your diet, all you want to eat is exactly this “forbidden food”, the food that you have been depriving yourself from. Your body is smart, it knows what it wants and usually it wants what you don’t give to him. Be aware that this is usually the beginning of many eating disorders and that the restriction-binge cycle not only will have no benefit on your weight loss but might put you in a spiral of endless dieting without any results. There are certain athletes that eat a certain way but again this is a specific group of people that is eating restrictively for example because their sport requires this from them. Even they have their “off periods” and are not perfect all the time. We are all human at the end of the day and being constantly on a restrictive regime is not only dangerous, boring but also no fun whatsoever.
2. Diets can be very harmful for your health because they lack very often quite a bit of nutrients. Again, your body will go through a phase of trying to accept this lifestyle but again after a while you will either get very sick of you will start eating in much bigger quantities the food you were missing out on. Your weight will bounce back and again, the yo-yo dieting will kick in. You will gain back the weight, then feel guilty, blame the diet and yourself for failing, binge for a while on the food you were restricting yourself and then go on another new diet that you read or heard about and there goes the circle again.
3. There is no pleasure in being on a diet. We all live busy lives, we all have social events, birthday parties, holidays, office events where certain food is being served. Being constantly on a diet prevents you from enjoying these events which is what life is all about!
4. Some diets are difficult to keep up with especially with busy lifestyles we all have. Many have ingredients you can’t find, are too expensive, take long time to prepare and costly
5. When we restrict calories, our brain associates restriction with starvation. So dieting can be seen as a stressor to the body, which causes stimulation of more stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline. What happens next is that our metabolism slows down so we burn calories at a slower rate. As the body tries to run on fewer calories, leftover calories are stored as fat. Your body wants to store the food because it is afraid when the food will be coming next.