by Sharon Early

Created on: June 15, 2010   Last Updated: June 16, 2010

Getting off the diet roller coaster  Making sustainable changes to your lifestyle

Many people go on crash diets, fad diets, and diets that are just not healthy. Any diet that removes entire food groups from your diet entirely is not good for you. A diet that requires you to replace meals with beverages is not sustainable.

Most people go on diets to reach a certain weight by a specific deadline. Normally the goal is to lose ten or twenty pounds before some special event or to get into a specific dress size.

Even when people are dieting to lose substantial amounts of weight like 50-150 pounds the goal is usually to get to a certain number on the scale or to get to a certain clothing size. Once the goal is achieved the diet is often abandoned. When this happens the weight normally begins to creep back on and the dieter finds their weight back where they started or worse even heavier, often in no time at all.

This is the pattern of the chronic dieter. They diet to take off some weight either because they have made a resolution or they want to look better for an event such as a reunion or a trip. They are self conscious of their weight all the time but they push it to the back of their mind or put it on the back burner for the most part. Then they go on one of the trendy new diets or some kind of crash diet because they want results quickly. If they don’t get fast results most people will begin to “cheat” on their diets rather adjusting their dietary intake to increase the results that they are getting. Once the “cheating” begins it can be a slippery slope and can cause one to lose even less weight than before because they are introducing additional foods and their calories into a diet for which they were not included.

The reason that dieters tend to fail to lose any significant amount of weight or manage to keep the weight off for any long period of time is because in order to change your body you have to change your lifestyle. Changes to your lifestyle include changing the way you eat, when you eat, and what you eat. You will also have to include physical activity to your lifestyle, running, aerobics, walking, whatever type of exercise you would like to pursue. In order to lose weight, especially a significant amount of weight you are going to have to increase your metabolism. Improving the way that your body metabolizes and burns calories will have to include some type of aerobic or strength training exercise.

The American Medical

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