The Dieting Dilemma
You go on a diet. You lose weight. So far so good. At that point in time, you may consider that the diet ‘worked’. But what happens next?
For a staggering 95% of people, weight is regained. And so you go on another diet….
Losing weight is not the challenge. Keeping it off is. Diets rarely achieve this. This is not your fault – diets are unlikely to deliver lasting results. And here’s why.
Diets are a fast-track to weight loss – who wouldn’t want a shortcut?
But diets completely bypass and ignore the cause of your weight problem. They take you straight to the desired outcome – weight loss – but they do not address the eating problems that caused you to be overweight in the first place. So weight is regained.
Your problem is the way you eat when you are not on a diet. By avoiding addressing the true problem, diets cannot offer you a good solution.
No diet will ‘work’ if you don’t invest time understanding why you eat the way you normally do.
Most people who want to lose weight consider that their weight is their problem. With this focus on weight, the obvious decision is to diet. With predictable weight regain.
If the focus was switched to identifying and improving unhelpful eating behaviours, then weight loss could follow naturally. Weight is not the problem. Your way of eating is.
The best reasons to eat are:
- to satisfy hunger
- for nutrition
- for food pleasure
Your starting point for meaningful food improvements is not to focus on what you are eating, but to focus on how and why you eat. Less helpful reasons to eat include:
- habits
- boredom
- comfort eating
- eating food ‘just because it’s there’
- guilt induced eating….and more
There are numerous reasons why we eat as we eat, and your challenge becomes identifying and improving yours.
This needs to happen in the context of your normal eating patterns, not in the false world of a diet.
Identify and improve your food problems before changing what you eat.
Using the analogy of a house, consider this initial stage like getting the foundations sound. Without a solid foundation, it won’t be long until the cracks appear, with eventual collapse.
If you have a history of losing weight, only to put it back on again, it’s time for a different approach.
If you wish to further explore the information in the Diet Dilemmas blogs, see Diet Dilemmas book.
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