1. Why Diets Don't Work

1. Diets Don’t Work Well.  Period.

We get fooled because diets often work for a temporary period.  When we start a diet plan, we expect to reach the goals we set for ourselves, but when we gradually come to realize that we won’t be successful at reaching the goal, we lose our motivation and give up.  Even though our experience tells us that dieting doesn’t work, we continue to try different diets in the hope that eventually we will have success in reaching our goal.

There are many societal beliefs about diet culture.  For example, “For a diet to be successful, we need to…

• Be Hungry,
• Sacrifice,
• Blindly retrict foods,
• Have willpower,
• Be perfect,
• Sweat it off,
• Be an ideal weight

There are many reasons why diets fail, here are a few:

All-or-nothing thinking.  Diets involve rigid rules and do not make room for mistakes or ‘falling off the wagon.’  This kind of thinking can quickly lead to simply giving up when the weight isn’t coming off.  All-or-nothing thinking is often accompanied by ‘should’ thinking, and can lead to poor choices.  “Oh, man I should have never eaten that cookie – I blew it – I guess I might as well eat what I want for the rest of the day.”

Rigid ideas of success.  Goals are good, but diet plans define success by numbers on the scale.  Diet plans often advertise their success with stories of folks that have lost large amounts of weight.  When we start to realize we will not achieve our specific weight loss goal, it can leave us thinking things like: “if I can’t achieve that goal, what’s the point in working at this?’ leading us to simply give up.

Wrong focus.  Diet plans are prescriptive.  They hold out a set of rules, do’s and don’ts – if we follow these rules, we’re promised weight loss success.   The problem is that each person is unique, and there are not one-size-fits-all solutions.  Focusing on prescribed, rigid rules instead of learning to problem-solve to discover what holds you back from successful weight management can make long-term success impossible.

Confidence Erosion.  When we continue to address health habits from a prescribed  set of rules instead of learning to problem-solve our own barriers and solutions, we can invest a large amount of effort and emotional energy without apparent success.  This can lead us to give up, and we feel like we’ve ‘failed again.’
 

Dieting affects our physical body, our mind, and our eating behavior in serious ways:

Mind.  When diets don’t work out we can feel guilt/ shame/ sadness/ failure/ frustration/confusion/ self-blame.  These feelings can sabotage future weight loss attempts.  This perceived failure can lead to multiple thought distortions, poor self-esteem, and depression – making us more desperate to try another new diet, while at the same time making us less mentally ‘fit’ to make healthy food and fitness choices.

Body.  When we go on a diet, our bodies change how they work.  Our body tries to protect us from weight loss because it thinks we are starving.  The metabolism slows down to try and conserve energy by reducing the number of calories we burn.  Scientists call it “adaptive thermogenesis”, we call it “starvation mode.”  The body fights this perceived starvation by increasing hunger and slowing weight loss.  This can lead to the diet ‘failing’ and even weight cycling where even more weight is regained.

Eating Behaviours.  Diets can lead to even stronger cravings than when you started the diet.  They can leave a person with new eating behaviours, such as binge eating, emotional eating, restrictive eating, or loss of hunger cues.

 

As we begin crafting a new healthy lifestyle, we can have better success by creating new habits and ways of thinking that minimize the pitfalls of the diet mentality.