Mind Over Weight

Why diets don’t work

There is a discrepancy in the way  our society views how to lose weight. Everywhere you look there are the latest diets, the best way to stick to your diet, the diet to get you slim for summer or for Christmas or for your holidays diet.

All these diets are promoted as the only way to lose your excess weight and  have your body transformed into a beautiful and probably rather unrealistic shape in just a few days.

On the other hand if you keep on reading  you will find articles and books which declare that diets don’t work. So who and what can you believe?

If you weigh more than you would like to weigh it is very tempting to attempt a quick fix diet. Half starve yourself for a few weeks and you will have the body of your dreams. No problem. Or is there? I’ll tell you why diets don’t work.

1. You may lose weight but it will be mainly fluid
2. When you restrict certain foods or drastically reduce the amount of food you eat you will after a few days crave the foods you have stopped eating.
3. It is bad for your general health to restrict what you eat to certain food groups and exclude others.
4. When you cut down hugely  on the amount you eat your body  goes into ‘starvation mode’ and  try to conserve both energy and food stores as fat. It will manage on less food so that when you reach your desired weight and increase what you eat you weight will increase rapidly again and is likely to be higher than the  weight you started with.
5. Life happens even when you are trying to lose weight: it is extremely difficult to have a social life and stick rigidly to any eating programme for a sustained length of time.

So instead a dieting you have to change your mind-set towards weight loss. You have to

• learn again what hunger feels like and how to satisfy it.
• Not satisfy your hunger with high dense foods such as those containing excessive sugar and fat and refined carbohydrates.
• Enjoy eating more healthy food
• Discover new flavours
• Eat a balance of protein , carbohydrates and fat
• Look at ways to cut down or remove from you food any thing with sugar and  high saturated fat content.
• Stop turning to food when you are upset or depressed, instead find other ways to deal with these emotions.