by Tirzah Hawkins

Created on: June 10, 2010

How many times have you personally been on a diet? How many close friends or family members do you know who have been on multiple diets throughout their lifetime?  Do you ever wonder why you always hear about someone starting a diet, but you don't often hear about people who have just finished a diet? 

 It seems like a rare thing for someone to reach their goal weight and be "off a diet".  So what can you do to increase the possibility of success for your next diet?  We will look at several things that factor into the high failure rate of "diets".

 People tend to think of a diet as a strict eating program to go on for a certain length of time.  This probably includes a strict sudden change in the foods you eat, how many calories you consume daily and may even eliminate certain foods altogether.  This kind of diet may seem easy and novel for the first few days; but your body quickly begins to feel like it is starving; and you begin to crave "forbidden" foods.

 By day seven, you are raiding the pantry and feeling really guilty about your total lack of willpower.  You will either try the diet again for a few more days or call the diet plan a total waste of time and energy. 

 So what went wrong?  To start with, it is really hard to change your whole way of eating overnight and maintain it for any length of time.  Also, when you drastically reduce calories one day, your body begins to go into starvation mode making you crave high energy foods full of fat and sugar.  And before you started the diet, you didn't get rid of the snack food in your pantry, so it was readily available in a moment of weakness.

 There is flawed thinking in believing that you can follow a diet program, reach your goal weight, and then go back to how you ate before.  Living the way you lived and ate before will only allow the weight to come back on.  There must be a lifestyle change in order for the weight loss to be maintained.

 Another reason diets fail is because of a lack of results.  If you stop losing weight for several weeks while you are still dieting, you have hit a plateau.  Plateaus can often cause people to give up on their diet.  Working through the plateau is a better option.  If your calories are already drastically restricted, it is probably a lack of exercise causing the plateau.  Adding more intense exercises can help push past the plateau without adding more time to your exercise schedule.

 Unreal expectations can also cause diets to fail.  People that are unhappy in general may feel that losing weight will fix the way they feel about themselves.  But not attending to the emotional problems inside you will have a sabotaging effect on your diet.  This is especially true for people who are emotional eaters. 

 Now, what should you do differently?  Gradually make healthy changes that you can live with.  You need to think of diet as your every day food consumption, not a structured plan you only follow for a set length of time.  Make one change every week and continue to add a healthy change every subsequent week.  This will help you to ease into a healthy diet that will become a lifestyle change.  Gradually reduce your calorie consumption so your body can adjust to it.

Learn more about this author, Tirzah Hawkins.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.