The Real Reason Why Diets Fail
Posted on June 25, 2022 by Natalie Fayman, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Your brain is programmed to resist change. But you can do it if you know how to make your mind work for you, not against you.
If you’re like most people who are unhappy with their weight, you’ve probably tried a dozen diets (or more) in hopes of creating the body you want. You’ve starved and suffered and white-knuckled your way through weeks or months of deprivation while your friends and family continued to enjoy “forbidden” foods that you couldn’t have anymore. You made yourself get up early to go to the gym, or exercise outside when you really just wanted to sleep for another half-hour. You mustered up superhuman willpower, and maybe you even had some success losing the weight. So what happened?
If you’re like 97% of the population, you just couldn’t keep it up. Old habits crept back in. You got a taste of what it used to be like when you didn’t have to deprive yourself. Little by little, you let your diet go and started eating the way you used to. And the weight that you lost… it found you again.
We go through these self-destructive cycles over and over again. Feel bad about yourself-restrict and deprive-get frustrated and quit-rebound and regain. Repeat, repeat, repeat. But know this: it’s not your fault. You’ve been misled and deceived by the weight-loss industry, because the only way they make money is if you stay desperate for the “miracle cure”. If you actually knew how to lose your weight for good, they’d lose a customer.
Here’s the little-known secret: ANY diet will work. That’s because in order to lose weight, all you need to do is create a gentle calorie deficit on a consistent, daily basis. The reason we fail to sustain the weight we lose through dieting or exercise is because we focus so much on changing what we DO, that we don’t pay any attention at all to the real secret: changing how we THINK.
While you’re so focused on counting calories or carbs or points, or whatever diet-method you chose this time around… you’re still secretly wishing for “the good old days” when you got to eat whatever you want, as much as you want. You’re still telling yourself a story about how much you enjoyed it, but can’t have it anymore. Over the course of your lifetime, you connected food with love, companionship, entertainment, comfort, and belonging. When you tell yourself that you can’t have your favorite foods anymore, what you’re really teling yourself is that you can’t have those feelings anymore. Is it any wonder why we can’t keep it up forever?
Very few people can keep doing something they find unpleasant for very long. Willpower is a limited resource. Eventually, you’re going to run out of it. So what’s the answer?
Stop making yourself the victim of your own story. If you’re telling yourself that you hate your new life, how miserable and unfair it is that you can’t have the things you love anymore, or how everything that gave you pleasure in life has to be taken away in order to lose the weight… of course you’re not going to stick with it! The reason most people want to lose weight is to FEEL better. So what kind of sense does it make to try and get there by feeling even worse than you did before? Most people will get to a point where they say “F—- it! It’s just not worth it. I might as well just eat and be happy.”
That’s the problem. We just want to feel better and be happy. But you don’t create happiness by depriving, suffering, restricting, and feeling miserable. Any diet that puts you in a calorie deficit will work. But it only works until you get sick of doing it. It only works until you get to the “F—- it” moment. Once you resume your old eating habits again, the weight comes back. (And sometimes even more than what you lost).
The key to making weight loss easy and sustainable is to change the victim-story you’re telling yourself about adopting new habits. That’s the real secret to success, and that’s where a diet can’t help you. Keeping the weight off for good depends on changing your eating habits-permanently! So it’s critical that you don’t do anything to lose weight that you’re not willing to keep doing for the rest of your life. Our brains want to repeat behaviors that we find pleasant or rewarding. Focus on your enjoyment of the process. Spend 5 minutes at the end of your day to list out all the things you did right, and all the ways that you’re proud of yourself. Find a way to dwell in the positive, not the negative. Stop telling yourself how much it sucks, how miserable you are, or how unfair it is that you can’t do things the way you used to. Start telling yourself how much you love the new life you’re creating, how proud of yourself you are at the end of the day, and how amazing it feels to be taking better care of yourself. The story you tell yourself in your head all day/every day will set the tone for how you feel about yourself and your life. How you feel determines what actions you take or don’t take. And it’s your actions that create your results. So better results start with leveling-up the way you talk to yourself. When you narrate the story of your own life, will you be the victim or the hero? The pilot or the passenger? Your choice will determine whether you keep repeating the same old ineffective patterns, or if you’ll create a new path forward.
