Why diets don’t work? Did you know that the average person tries between 55 to 126 diets in their lifetime? According to the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, half of all US adults are on a diet at any given time: 56.3 percent of women and 42.2 percent of men. But despite these high figures for dieting, nearly half of the US population is obese and an additional 32 percent are overweight. Why? Because diets don’t work.
It’s simple if you think about it: rates of obesity are rapidly increasing but so are the rates of people on diets. So by reasoning alone – diet’s don’t work. If they did, the rates of obesity would be stagnating.
So why don’t diets work?
You don’t need a diet, you need a lifestyle change. You don’t need to restrict your food intake, you need to change your food intake. You don’t need to feel guilty and ashamed, you need to feel empowered to transform your life.
If you start a very calorie-restrictive diet with hopes that you’ll lose 10 lbs in a week – I’m telling you now, you won’t. Our bodies are designed to eat, we need protein, carbohydrates, and fat every single day and enough of them – otherwise, we will crave them until we give in. We’re not giving in because we don’t have discipline or self-control, we’re giving in because of biochemical changes that are occurring that are demanding food.
For an example of the biochemical changes that occur – according to research published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, our body fights to maintain our body weight via an effector signal that modulates food intake or energy expenditure, boosting certain hormones, neural pathways and neurotransmitters to increase or decrease food intake or activity.
So if you go on a restrictive diet and think you’ll just drop weight easily – think again. Diets that focus on insane calorie restriction will be difficult to follow and are completely unsustainable – they are not lifestyle adaptive.
Find a way of eating that becomes a new way of living, something that is sustainable, creates a small calorie deficit and is enjoyable (to some extent at least). If a keto diet works well for you, keep at it. If a plant-based diet works well for you, that’s awesome! Ultimately it comes down to this: the best ‘diet’ is the one you can stick to.
If you’re finding one, why don’t you check this out first? 5 Different Diet Types to Know About Before You Pick One