Tuesday, August 11, 2009
There’s really nothing magical to weight loss no matter what you want to believe. Eat less or exercise more and you will lose some amount of weight. How much depends on several factors depending on the severity of the diet, how long you stay on it, gender, genetics and a host of other stuff. But, fundamentally, losing weight is not difficult.
The biggest problem is most people who lose weight (through any method) will gain it all back within some period of time. Sometimes they gain back more weight than they started with and end up even fatter.
Most people don’t maintain that weight loss in the long run. They lose it, but then they gain it all back (or more). So the problem is not weight loss; rather, the problem is with maintenance of weight loss.
The way that diets fail is focusing only on the short-term and this applies in a couple of different ways. Ignoring diets promising quick and easy weight loss. If you have a weight/fat to lose, you need to start thinking in the long-term, you will need to make changes both, diet and activity, and maintain them in the long-term. DON’T think that once you have lost the weight with one diet or another, you can revert to your old habits and keep the weight off. You’ll just get fat back again. You may using an extreme diet to generate initial rapid weight/fat losses (for very short term) and then move into a moderate diet for the longer term.
Majority of diets out there are fairly simple one-size-fits all approaches. Most nutritionists take the same attitude. Although humans share the same general physiology, there are always subtle differences (usually in terms of protein intake or calories but sometimes not even that). The drug that will work optimally for one person may not work as well for another, even if they suffer from the same disease.
As I said in my previous post, taking this kind of diet without any adaptation to your body/conditions will fail. Active person tend to need more carbohydrates than those who are not. There can’t be any single approach that works for all people or all conditions equally well.
So there’s some of the reasons I think diets tend to fail dieters.
The biggest problem is most people who lose weight (through any method) will gain it all back within some period of time. Sometimes they gain back more weight than they started with and end up even fatter.
Most people don’t maintain that weight loss in the long run. They lose it, but then they gain it all back (or more). So the problem is not weight loss; rather, the problem is with maintenance of weight loss.
The way that diets fail is focusing only on the short-term and this applies in a couple of different ways. Ignoring diets promising quick and easy weight loss. If you have a weight/fat to lose, you need to start thinking in the long-term, you will need to make changes both, diet and activity, and maintain them in the long-term. DON’T think that once you have lost the weight with one diet or another, you can revert to your old habits and keep the weight off. You’ll just get fat back again. You may using an extreme diet to generate initial rapid weight/fat losses (for very short term) and then move into a moderate diet for the longer term.
Majority of diets out there are fairly simple one-size-fits all approaches. Most nutritionists take the same attitude. Although humans share the same general physiology, there are always subtle differences (usually in terms of protein intake or calories but sometimes not even that). The drug that will work optimally for one person may not work as well for another, even if they suffer from the same disease.
As I said in my previous post, taking this kind of diet without any adaptation to your body/conditions will fail. Active person tend to need more carbohydrates than those who are not. There can’t be any single approach that works for all people or all conditions equally well.
So there’s some of the reasons I think diets tend to fail dieters.
2 Responses to "Why Diets Fail?"
August 14, 2009 at 5:59 AM
August 21, 2009 at 2:54 AM
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