by Carol Wise

Created on: June 21, 2009   Last Updated: June 22, 2009

After years of dieting with the results always being an initial loss of weight, followed by regaining the weight I had lost plus more I had in total and utter frustration sworn I would never diet again. I couldn't afford to I was already over 500 hundreds. So for many years I maintained that weight, fluctuating within about a twenty pound range. At least I wasn't going ever higher. But I was also ill and I got tired of being ill. I didn't feel I was getting the help I needed from my doctor so I set about to heal myself. Eventually my weight was something I would have to address but how in the world was I going to lose weight and not diet. Sounded crazy to even myself.

Diets work, I don't think I have ever been on a diet and not lost at least some weight. Of course I have also starved, had cravings and wanted the foods that were made taboo by each diet I tried. I began to examine why each time the result was always the same, regaining the weight I'd lost plus more. I decided one of the problems with dieting is that it is almost always considered a temporary way to eat. Dieters are always waiting to reach their goal so they can off the diet. Which usually leaves them returning to the old habits that got them in need of the diet in the first place.

Next, I realized that another flaw with diets are the forbidden foods. There is some huge psychological effect that as soon as some thing becomes "forbidden" and suddenly I want it. Think about it when I was a teen and my parents went to go out, they would often list the things I wasn't suppose to do while they were away. Most often I would end up wishing they hadn't given me the list, I had not even thought of doing those things, but now they were fresh in my mind and I wanted to do them. Consider pornography, many people consider it forbidden or sinful. Women are offended by it and demand their husbands not view it, and get upset when they find their man has. When my first husband showed me his collection, my response was "So?". I don't think he added to his collection the entire time we were married.

These forbidden foods often include whole food groups that deplete our systems of important nutrients and so we crave them, so there is a double whammy. Unfortunately the diet industry has lied to us for years and we have come to believe those lies. I decided that having taboo foods was counter productive. I examined all of the diets I had been on and why I had failed on each one. It wasn't always the diet, I did

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