Why Conventional Diets Never Work

You've probably heard of this before - someone goes on a diet, loses a bit of weight, but then two weeks after they have ended the diet they are actually heavier than they were before! Not good. Why is this? Well, conventional diets are for the short term. They do not take into account how your body actually works or how it responds to a lack of food. A diet is simply a method of starving your body of the food it requires until you are at your ideal weight.

With a diet, you are instructed to eat a restricted amount of calories until you are at your target weight. When you have achieved this, you are 'allowed' to start eating 'normally' again. Then what happens? Two weeks later, voila, you've put the weight back on and are back to square one. Once again you are looking for the next 'fad' which will promise to help you 'lose weight quickly, safely and naturally'.

What you must ask yourself when presented with any of these 'fad' diets is if you can eat like that forever? Could you live the rest of your life without eating bread? Or drinking milk? Or cutting out something else you're advised not to eat? Doubtful. I think it would be a conservative estimate that the diet industry is worth hundreds of millions of pounds annually for businesses, and is still growing. On the same token, there are also crystal clear facts that obesity is on the rise.

Hmm, I would have thought that with the exploding diet industry promising to help you lose weight and get in shape, obesity levels would at least drop slightly? Apparently not!

Diets don't work, case closed.

The good news is that there is a way to lose weight (if that's your goal) and keep it off - by making sustainable changes to your eating habits. One problem though… For most people, change is scary, change is different, change is out of our comfort zone. Thankfully, the people who have made the necessary changes and have experienced long term health benefits look back and think "why the hell did I not do this before!"

The scary bit is just the thought of changing your habits and changing what you eat on a regular basis. Once you start implementing the changes, and start seeing results, these results become reassuring. This, in turn, motivates you to keep going and to keep it up. Once these new eating habits have been formed (this takes roughly 27 days), this is how you are now. This is the new you.

Diets are bad. Making the correct changes to your everyday eating habits is good.