If Diets Don’t Work, Then How Do You Lose Weight?
The headline du jour on all the diet news stories is: “Diets Don’t Work.”
Instead, they say you should eat less and exercise more.
Huh? Isn’t that a diet?
Here’s what I think doesn’t work…
- Fad diets that restrict your calories too severely. Starvation, anyone?
- Diets that don’t let you eat from all the food groups. I know the low-carb dieters will disagree with me on that one. But if they stay on the diet long-term, I think they’ll find they’ve modified it so much that it isn’t truly low-carb any longer.
- Diets that expect you to give up all your bad habits at once and follow perfect eating and exercising habits. No one’s perfect. So that one’s destined to fail.
- Diets that don’t allow you to snack. I’ve noticed that more and more weight loss programs are beginning to allow controlled cheating. I guess they’re finally catching on.
- Diets that are just too darn hard. If you spend every moment of your life analyzing what you eat, when do you get to enjoy life?
And the list could go on and on.
There is no one diet that works for everyone. But I think people deserve better than a headline like “Diets Don’t Work.”
To just let the obesity epidemic continue is unhealthy. There has to be some answer to it.
I realize people will think I have a vested interest in saying that diets do work. But I actually believe most don’t for the reasons I listed above.
That’s why I created my own.
But I also don’t believe for a minute that everyone should be on my diet. It will work for some people and not for others.
In fact, I plan to talk about that subject in a future post — how to determine what type of diet will fit your lifestyle and your personality.
I think the most important factor is whether you can live with your new eating habits for a lifetime. If you can’t, the diet won’t work for you.
That’s why my diet doesn’t have a separate maintenance plan. Because either your eating habits work or they don’t.
But that’s not news. That’s common sense.
So what do you think? Do diets work? Yes or no?
If no diet works, then what do you suggest? And why do you think your suggestion will work for everyone?
Or do you think we just have to live with obesity?
Technorati Tags: diet, dieting, lose weight, weight loss, obesity
April 24th, 2007 at 7:18 am
If you eat less to lose weight, that’s a diet. A rose by any other name…
April 24th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I think when people say that diets don’t work, they mean diet gimmicks. I’ve tried them all with the grapefruit diet and all that stuff and you just can’t stick with it. Then you gain all the weight back and more.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Call it whatever you want. Just stop eating so much. End of obesity.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
If you don’t want to diet, I think exercise can work on its own if you don’t have too much weight to lose. I don’t think exercise by itself will work if you’re obese. Then you have to take care of your eating problem, too.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
I read some of those stories about diets and they were talking a lot about long term weight loss. I think the problem is what Rita said about diet gimmicks. You can’t eat like that for the long term. Maybe the diets that don’t work don’t provide us with the kind of long term eating habits we need to keep the weight off. The other thing is that some of us may go back to our old eating habits after we reach our goal weight and it’s our own fault if we don’t stick with good eating habits.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
I gotta go with Jackie on this one.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I think that whether you go on a diet with a gimmick or not, the hardest part is trying to be perfect like Debbie says in her post. I’ve tried to do everything right at once and I always fall off the wagon. Maybe the answer is small changes that we can all live with.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
The diet that works is the diet that works for you. There can’t be a diet that works for everybody. We’re all too different.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I think almost all diets work if you’re willing to stick with it. But no one wants to do that because it isn’t easy plus we like to indulge ourselves. Finding a diet that suits you is the biggest part of the battle.
April 24th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
I read the recent study of 31 diet studies which said diets do not work. I think it’s a good study with useful observations and suggestions. I believe the author suggests making small but significant changes in your lifestyle and these will lead to a successful result over time. Think of it as walking in a direction, then just turning 1 degree to the left and walking. If you look where you are in two steps from where you would have been staying on the original path it wouldn’t be much different, but 500 steps later you will find yourself quite removed from your old path. I think this is the lesson in the study. Small sustainable changes work. If you can do large changes and sustain then…you go guy! It’s just that the vast majority of people are unsuccessful if they do it that way.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
I think the obesity epidemic would be greatly reduced if we had a major paradigm shift - we must realize that eating fast food and processed food that is so easily available (and cheap) as a foundation of our diet is going to cause major health and weight problems. Allowing treats once and awhile is ok but you can’t eat junk food (ie processed) most of the time and expect to maintain a healthy weight. I think the key is to slowly remove these foods from your diet and replace them with healthier alternatives. Not to say I never eat fast food but I used to eat it every week (when I was 50 lbs heavier) but now it is about 3 times a year. I just think it boils down to moderation and slowly phasing out the unhealthy, processed foods while still allowing for occasional “cheats”.
Great post!
April 26th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Where the phrase “diets don’t work” came from a small research study, which is obsolete today. Even the researcher who conducted the study a long time ago doesn’t understand why we are still using its findings. The truth of the matter is marketers are using it to sell their weight loss product. News, folks, science is not a religion! Be careful with what you believe.