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Why diets don’t always work? The term diet is often misunderstood; most people think of diets as those temporary measures they engage in intending to meet a need, be it losing weight or achieving a specific goal for one’s body.
In general, dieters are less likely to lose a significant amount of weight. Some people have been trying different diets for many years; however, their weight remains the same.
In the case of women, As many as 90% of them go on a diet simultaneously in their lifetime. Very few people lose weight and there are even fewer people who can manage to maintain the lost weight.
In truth, the term diet simply refers to what one eats, and it would be accurate to say that the idea of dieting has become fairly easy to complicate and abuse, mostly taking an intricate interest in the percentages of macronutrients consumed, the types of foods constituting one’s meal, including all manner of restrictions and limitations.
Some diets do pose a danger to a certain type of individual, especially the so-called cleanses and their determination to eliminate all traces of what are sometimes essential nutrients from one’s diet.
Admittedly not all diets are scams intent on misusing the trust and desperation of individuals to make a quick profit; many a diet will emerge as a result of some good intentions to do some good, yet the number of positive testimonies regarding dieting is quite small.
What is on the rise is the number of disgruntled complaints about the total inefficacy of those most popular diets circulating the internet. The fact is diets do not have the greatest track record, and there are some good reasons for that.
Reasons Why Diets Don’t Work
While the answers vary, the most common will include the following:
Lack Of Motivation
Diets that require no motivation tend to fail. People who are unaware of the long-term consequences of a not sustainable diet may only make temporary changes. Even people with the best intentions tend to break their diet if they are not ready to commit.
That is why if you want to lose weight, you need to choose a healthy diet. Choose a diet that gives you an incentive to stick to it because you won’t want to stick to it if you aren’t going to get something in return.
Motivation is something that will help you stay on a diet longer. You will find that being motivated will lead you to success. People who are not motivated will soon give up on diets and nutrition.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to avoid diets that require no motivation or that you cannot stick to, because you are putting yourself at a real risk of failure.
You can achieve weight loss by choosing a diet that gives you plenty of variety and a healthy way to eat. You will also find that you will feel more confident about yourself if you have a healthy diet to look forward to.
Food Intolerance
The second reason that you will find a diet to fail is because of intolerance to certain foods. There are foods that you can eat and there are foods that you cannot eat.
In order to avoid a diet that you cannot handle, you have to know what foods will make you gag and what foods will make you gain weight.
Every person is different and you have to create a small list of foods that you can eat without guilt. You also have to determine which foods will make you gain weight. If you make this list, you should pinpoint what foods to avoid when making a diet.
No Self-Discipline
The third reason that diets fail is due to the lack of self-discipline that people give themselves. People give up before they ever start a diet. They lack self-discipline, which is taking control of their life by reaching goals and avoiding temptation. People need to have a set of behaviors they are willing to follow consistently in order to lose weight and keep it off.
If you don’t try to change yourself, you’ll never change. If you don’t try to change your life, you won’t even notice that you haven’t changed.
Eating the wrong foods is a decision. If you are not willing to make different decisions, you will fall back into your old habits.
Diets Are Temporary
It is a true and sad fact that no one engages with a diet to follow through with its steps for the rest of their lives. Diets are undertaken with a purpose in mind and once that purpose has been met, a few weeks and months down the line, dieting ends.
It is not easy to live a healthy lifestyle since it requires self-control and willingness to make permanent changes. Many people have no difficulty eating their favorite foods when they are not dieting but give up on a diet after a few days. And as soon as one stops engaging in the diet, they gain even more weight back than when they started.
Diets are Too Restrictive
The fact is the normal human body is wired to crave carbohydrates and fat. Most diets tend to elicit all manner of discomfort from those individuals engaging in these diets by aiming to strip one’s nutritional habits of these unhealthy components completely.
The pattern suggests that most people can only resist the temptation for sugar and fat for so long before giving in; it is of little surprise that a mechanism for achieving weight loss that aims to strip individuals of all that they naturally crave would fail in most cases.
Low Carbohydrate Diets Do Not Fair Any Better
Low-carb diets have been shown as a highly efficient method of losing weight, but not all people are willing to give up their favorite foods and live on a low carbohydrate regimen. But that is not the fault of the diet. It is not the diet that requires them to give up such foods but, rather, their lack of self-discipline.
On the other hand, If you restrict your intake of carbs severely, then your body will be forced to break down fats into ketones as energy. This is known as Ketosis. As a result of Ketosis, you may experience symptoms such as fatigue, headache, and bad breath.
Whether low-carb diets pose long-term health risks remains unclear. Having a diet that restricts carbohydrates may result in vitamin and mineral deficiencies and gastrointestinal problems in the long term.
This makes it difficult to stay the dieting course, especially when unable to perform daily tasks, not in light of an exhausted body and depressed mind.
Calorie Counting Not Always Work
Calorie counting is a challenging task. Sixty-seven percent of Americans say they consider calories when they make food purchases, but nine out of ten people are unsure how many they really need, according to a survey by the International Food Information Council Foundation.
Studies show that big meals and large portions (think Thanksgiving feasts and most restaurant dinners) can derail your calorie-counting efforts.
Calorie counting isn’t quite the health and weight loss breakthrough most people seem to assume it is; the body needs calories to function properly, especially maintaining its metabolic capabilities.
When the body is denied calories in the required amounts, it starts presuming that it is starving and immediately regulates downward the number of calories it needs at rest in an attempt to conserve energy.
With the body burning more calories at rest, this can prove dangerous to the body’s basic functions. More importantly, anyone trying to lose weight his way is more likely to lose lean muscle mass, with the body choosing to keep a hold of its fat reserves for energy purposes.
Increased Risk of Eating Disorders
Dieting may not cause eating disorders, but it can be an early sign. Specifically, the National Eating Disorders Association estimates that 35 percent of “normal dieters” become pathological dieters and that 20-25% of these individuals develop eating disorders. Based on a study, dieters are 8 times more likely to develop an eating disorder than non-dieters.
Dietary restriction is often associated with eating disorders since they are often used to control eating behavior, calorie counting, restricting food types, and obsessive weight control.
Diets are Unrealistic in Their Expectations
Overeating is a learned behavior that can be unlearned. There is no such thing as the perfect diet for the entire world. Each person has different nutritional needs, and as a result, every person has to create their own diet.
The only way to lose weight permanently is to find a diet that fits your lifestyle, one from which you can stick with and survive. It’s not surprising that many of them take the easy way out and blame diets for their lack of success in losing weight.
Some people are genetically predisposed to being overweight
It’s important to recognize that genes play a huge role in your body’s composition. If you have a family history of diabetes, heart disease, or other diseases which could be prevented by maintaining an ideal weight, it might be harder for you to lose weight.
Dieting is not as easy when your body struggles to shed pounds in the first place and when your body is attuned to storing fat rather than burning it off for energy. Although you can’t change your genes, you can still make a big difference in your weight.
Losing Weight Requires a Change in Lifestyle
Some people think that just dieting is enough. It is not. To lose more weight and keep it off, one needs to change their lifestyle in order to maintain that new weight. A diet should not be a temporary fix for problems but rather an opportunity to change oneself into a new state of mind and body.
Just by changing the way you eat, you can prevent diseases such as heart attacks, stroke, hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, and many others. These conditions cause pain and suffering in millions of people every day throughout the world.
People who don’t want to change their lifestyle and take control of their lives tend to have no guilt about being unhealthy. Ultimately, it’s not the diet that is at fault; it is the dieter.
