9 Reasons Why Dieting Fails… And What to Do Instead
Do Not Go on Another Diet Until You Read This. It’s the Diet That Fails, Not You!
I’ve been there.
I tried dozens of diets. Nothing really worked, and even when I lost weight, I still didn’t like my body. Disliking my reflection in the mirror was a horrible, horrible feeling.
I got married.
Everything was so beautiful, happy and romantic. I thought, “Now I can be happy! Now I’m complete!”
But it didn’t last. Falling in love didn’t make me love myself. I never felt like I was good enough. My thighs were too big, my hair wasn’t blonde, and those horrible pimples were ghastly. Argh!
Clearly, I was unattractive.
I felt jealous of all the beautiful women around, and I was constantly comparing myself to them…
…I didn’t measure up…
…I felt ashamed of my body and my feelings…
…And I was angry at my husband for not loving me the way I needed to be loved.
I blamed my body for my unhappiness. I was constantly on some diet. I was convinced my body was against me – it was obviously my enemy.
“If only I was thinner and more beautiful, he’d love me more.”
I felt like a failure. There was something wrong with me.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Please give me a couple of minutes to show you why you’ve been unsuccessful with dieting and maybe even feel like you’ll never be enough.
It’s not your fault.
And you’re going to find out exactly why in just a few moments.
You are going to learn about some amazing research that shows why dieting doesn’t work and most importantly, what to do instead.
For example, in Point #6 you’ll find out that dieting actually slows down the rate at which your body burns calories.
It’s true.
Are you ready to jump in?
Let’s look at the 9 reasons why diets don’t work.
Why Diets Don’t Work
Reason #1 – Dieting puts your body in a ‘survival weight gain mode’.
Most diets are restrictive diets.
In some way or form, dieting restricts what we eat. It could be the type of food, or it could be the calories we reduce.
And here is the BIG problem.
Restrictive dieting makes certain food forbidden; your enemy in your mind. And what happens when we can’t have something? We want it even more.
We crave it.
Restrictive diets put your body in survival mode, where it pretty much says:
“I need to save all my energy and fat in case there will be a lack of food again”.
This happens because when your body is under stress, it releases stress hormone cortisol that puts your body into this terrible state – survival weight gain mode.
When you eat less than you need for basic functioning, your body throws the brakes on your metabolism.
In case you aren’t already aware, metabolism is that wonderful process that turns food into energy and keeps you alive and going about your day.
It’s like your body says:
“I don’t know when my next meal will arrive, so let’s slow down and burn less energy, just to be safe.”
And what’s even more frustrating is that the body tries to put on weight when ‘survival weight gain mode’ switch is turned on.
Yes, some people do lose weight on a diet. But only 1 to 5 % of them are able to keep the weight off permanently.
And yes, some people do lose weight when they are stressed. Though, it’s dangerous for their health because fat protects our bodies from stress.
What slows down your metabolism?
The main cause of metabolic slowdown is a decrease in your active thyroid hormone. There are three reasons why thyroid hormone levels can decrease.
We’ll talk about the two of them that specifically relate to dieting:
1. Increased production of cortisol
The first cause of a thyroid hormone drop is an increase in cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands in response to psychological and physiological stress.
Usually women go on a diet because they don’t like their bodies…
- This creates psychological stress in the body.
- Perceived lack of food and calorie restriction creates physiological stress.
Both of these decrease thyroid hormone production and slow down your metabolism as a result.
2. The loss of lean muscle
Low calorie diets force the body to break down muscle tissue, but we’ll talk more about that when we get to Point #2.
The bottom line is that stressful and restrictive dieting:
- Reduces muscle mass
- Creates stress in the body
- As a result, slows down your metabolism.
Not exactly the outcome we’re looking for, right?
Reason #2 – Dieting reduces your total amount of muscle tissue.
This is how smart our bodies are!
Your body will do anything to preserve your life. Which of course, we appreciate most of the time. Just not when you’re trying to lose weight.
Your body does not believe that muscle tissue is as important for life as providing enough fuel for your organs. So it will get rid of any unnecessary energy-burning components such as muscle tissue.
And as we discussed in Point #1:
- Loss of muscle tissue
- Causes thyroid hormone production to go down, which in turn,
- Slows down your metabolism, and that means –
- It is harder for you to lose weight.
You should also know that there is a strong link between decreased muscle mass and insulin sensitivity.
- Decreased muscle mass correlates with…
- Insulin resistance…
- Which means more dietary glucose becomes fat…
- Which means it’s easier to gain weight.
Not quite what you are looking for, right?
Reason #3 – Dieting causes you to crave high-fat foods.
Calories equal energy to keep you moving. Protein and carbohydrates both contain 4 calories per gram, while fat provides 9 calories per gram.
If there is not enough food (and that’s exactly what restrictive dieting makes your body believe) and your body’s goal is to store as much energy as possible for your survival, what kind of food will you be craving?
Hmmm… 4 calories vs. 9.
Fat, of course!
For the same quantity of food we can get twice as many calories with fatty foods. Fat is the winner – no contest! No wonder it’s hard to resist that cake or ice-cream when we are on a diet.
It’s all starting to make sense now, isn’t it? Can you see that it’s not your fault?
Your body is smart with a focus on preserving your life, which we totally appreciate! But can you see now that a tiny waist is not on your body’s “to do” list?
It’s not evolutionarily necessary.
Dieting is actually detrimental to sustaining and procreating life because women with low body fat can have challenging time becoming pregnant. Small waists, while considered desirable, are not necessarily good for procreation.
What have we learned so far? Your body’s priority is preserving life. It doesn’t care less about getting into your size 2 jeans!
Reason #4 – Dieting increases your body’s efficiency at digesting food so you get hungrier quicker.
Again, once the body realizes that it’s not getting enough food to sustain you, it will find a way to get as much energy as possible from the food it does get.
The puzzle is starting to piece together now.
>>The more we diet…
>>the more our body is flooded with the hormones that tell it we need to put ourselves in preservation mode.
>>The more we put it through this process of restriction…
>>the more efficient our body becomes at squeezing every possible calorie out of every single thing we eat.
It becomes the conservation queen, holding on to every little last morsel of fat until it once again feels safe enough to relax, sure that you aren’t in danger of starving to death.
Why oh why do our bodies have to be clever?
Reason #5 – Dieting increases your appetite.
The body doesn’t generally like change. It wants to maintain homeostasis where everything stays regulated and essentially the same.
So when we diet, our body starts to produce more of a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin is produced primarily in the lining of the stomach and is responsible for increasing our appetite.
You say:
“I’m living on grass. When will I start losing weight?”
Ghrelin says:
“I’m hungry! When do we eat?”
This is that annoying guy that makes us think about food all day long. He also makes us feel hungry even when we’ve just finished eating… If our brain believes there could be lack of food soon.
It’s the “gremlin” you’re not supposed to feed after midnight. But we feed it every time we start restricting the number of calories we take in. And then we can’t get the beast back in his cage. He wreaks havoc on our appetites and ruins our diets.
And we blame ourselves for when our diets don’t work; we think we can control our appetite! Our bodies are just way smarter than we think.
We can’t really blame ghrelin, though – he’s just doing his job to keep us alive.
Ghrelin doesn’t know that there is more food available in the world than we can ever need. His evolutionary responses kicks in and our weight loss plans go down the drain.
Reason #6 – Dieting slows the rate at which your body burns calories.
You’ve heard this.
The body is a beautifully designed being. Its job is to preserve your life and it has innumerable processes in place to do just that.
It’s got a mind of its own.
Our bodies have learned over time, through evolution, to preserve energy by burning fewer calories if there isn’t enough food around.
This is the stuff that saved our early ancestors from extinction. If their bodies hadn’t learned to adapt to periods without food, we would have died out a long time ago.
It’s impressive.
But can’t we push the pause button on some of this when we’re trying to lose weight? Can we get a break here?
Not really.
Dieting makes our bodies believe that there is not enough food around. And our bodies slow the rate at which they burn calories.
Sometimes it just feels like your body is working against you, doesn’t it? Even if it is very intelligently designed to save your life and is doing an amazing job at that.
Reason #7 – Dieting reduces your energy levels
Your body conserves your energy in the event of another perceived “starvation incident.”
Just keeping your body alive takes a lot of energy, so it doesn’t want you to run a marathon when you’re already low on fuel.
To preserve your energy when there is not enough food to fuel your body for basic functioning, the body naturally starts to shut down all those processes that will burn it unnecessarily.
This is when you start to feel lethargic and uninspired. Maybe you just want to sleep all the time and wonder:
“Where did all of my energy go?”
Of course, we all know that exercise is the one of the best ways to lose weight.
– But exercise burns fuel!
And when you don’t have enough supply of food to keep you going, your brain tells your system to save energy and move less.
Are you seeing a theme here? Even though you need muscle to stand up and move, it just isn’t at the top of your body’s priority list.
Another wonderful way your system has learned to save energy is to lower your body temperature. On top of being hungry and tired, you now tend to feel cold all the time.
– No wonder that the world of dieting is miserable…
– No wonder it is so difficult to sustain a restrictive diet…
– No wonder that most people regain all the weight back in a year or so…
Sometimes they even gain more back than they started with!
Reason #8 – Dieting confuses your internal signals of fullness and hunger, so you confuse emotional upset with hunger.
As we’ve already said:
* our hunger is controlled by our hormones,
* primarily ghrelin (that little appetite-producing hormone / “gremlin”)
* and another hormone called leptin (our appetite-suppressing hormone).
Can someone please introduce me to leptin?!
Side note: humans tried to reproduce leptin in pills, but unfortunately it hasn’t worked wonders as promised. Our bodies are more complicated than that.
Dieting interferes with the signals these hormones are sending to your brain. Result – you may think you’re hungry when you really aren’t.
Just what we need!
This is also linked to why, when we are emotionally upset, we have a tendency to overeat.
We know something doesn’t feel right, but our brain is sending us mixed signals, so we start to confuse upset with hunger.
* Feeling anxious about your relationship and lack of communication?
– Let’s eat to fix it!
* Feeling angry because your kids don’t behave?
– Your favorite chips will cool your frustration.
* Feeling sad because there is just no time for you and no one really cares?
– That pint of ice cream in the freezer will numb your pain.
The reality is that your emotions cannot be healed with food. You’re not hungry; your computer has just gone a little haywire and is giving you incorrect information about what you need.
Reason #9 – Dieting confuses your internal signals of fullness and hunger, so food advertisements and social situations affect your choice of food & the amount you eat.
Dieters are more vulnerable to the external cues.
Why?
Because signals from hunger hormones become confusing when we are dieting.
Commercials are already made to make you crave the product they are selling. You are more affected by the pictures, sounds and imagined smells of the food in commercials when these hormones are tricking you into believing you are hungry.
When you’re out with friends, you order what they are ordering. Or you all decide to be a little “bad” and indulge in a high calorie appetizer.
If they are eating it, that makes it okay, right? But does your body really want it?
When you see and smell the food it is even harder to resist, so you dig in only to regret it later. Because it doesn’t make your body feel good.
Your body might believe it needs to eat whenever food is available.
- You eat when you’re not truly hungry.
- Or you eat way more than you really need.
- Or you eat the food that doesn’t feed your body or soul. But makes you feel bloated and irritable.
Take your chance while you can get it!
And businesses are all about making money, they have their tricks to get consumers to purchase more food.
Here is what research has shown:
People who are offered a tray with a large selection of desserts to choose from after their meal are more likely to order something if they are dieting – even if they said no to a dessert menu before.
This is how diets fail and you end up stuck on the Willpower Battle Road…
Download pdf showing why diets don’t’ work and how we get on the Willpower Battle Road, click here.
Sounds exciting, right?
The Willpower Battle Road. Do I get to choose my own avatar, car and weapon? Who am I fighting with again?
Well, maybe it isn’t so thrilling, but does it at least sound familiar?
The Willpower Battle Road starts with the Perfect Body Myth.
The beauty that we see every day in social media, in magazines and movies is unrealistic.
But we see it.
Everywhere.
So we believe it.
The truth is that these “perfect” people are nothing more than the creation of make-up artists, photographers, and that self-esteem crushing program called Photoshop.
Of course, models don’t look anything like the photos we see in magazines!
Many models and actresses have been honest about the work that is done to their photos to make them look so flawless.
But that still doesn’t change what we subconsciously believe to be our reality.
According to recent research, 91% of women are unhappy with their bodies and try dieting to achieve their ideal body shape. Unfortunately, only 5% of women naturally possess the body type we constantly see in the media.
Even if those 5% aren’t perfect and rely on Photoshop to enhance their looks, they still have some things in common, like body size and other physical traits the rest of us aren’t blessed with.
What exactly is the world trying to tell us? That 5% of the women in the world got it right and the other 95% of us have something terribly wrong with our bodies?
Yeah, right!
What is the lesson here?
It’s simple:
- Don’t believe the media because there is not one perfect body type!
- Be grateful for what your body was created to do, like making children, feeling the sun on your skin, enjoying your senses of sight, hearing and smell, and enjoying the simple act of movement.
How lovely!
But this is the real world, and women who grow up seeing these unrealistic images of the “perfect woman” are influenced by the perfect body myth and judge themselves by its ruler.
This often causes women to resort to unhealthy, restrictive dieting in an attempt to achieve what can never be theirs. We also spend tons of money on beauty products each year trying to cover up our “flaws” and feel better about ourselves.
What To Do Instead:
You might be wondering, what if I still want to change my body? What should I do? Is it a lost cause?
The answer is simple.
Are you ready?
Drumroll please…
STOP DIETING!
Make a big celebratory fire with all your fad diet books, light cooking magazines and diet supplements. Burn them. They’re worth as much as rubble anyway.
And start creating a partnership with your body. Even more, start loving your body. Then, and only then, will your body start co-operating with you and responding to your loving care.
Because that’s when your body will be free from starvation to tell you what food is good for you and when you are actually hungry.
Look how much this makes sense now that you know how your body responds to dieting!
- You are unique, so you need to eat according to your unique bio-individuality.
- You need to communicate with your body in order to know your body’s unique needs.
When you make friends with your body you will find that you start craving foods that make you feel good and create a healthy weight and shape for you.
When you love your body and show it care, you’ll unlock its ancient wisdom and discover what really feeds your body and spirit.
Ahh, and then you’ll feel confident in your own skin and feel vibrantly healthy!
At last!
Here are some additional benefits of creating a loving relationship with this form you were born in:
- Your immune system will function at its best.
- You’ll reclaim your vibrant health.
- You’ll feel kind, flexible, generous and caring.
- You’ll become irresistibly attractive, because that’s what happiness and confidence do.
- You’ll enjoy a loving intimate relationship. Because only by loving yourself you can truly love another and more importantly, accept their love.
- You’ll pass positive self-image on to your children.
- You’ll have extra energy to put into making your dreams come true.
- You’ll have a chance to create a positive impact on the world.
- You’ll live a long, healthy, and happy life.
It sounds simple enough, right?
But is it really that easy to sweep away all the brainwashing you’ve had your entire life?
I’ll be honest, it’s going to take some work. But I promise it’s worth it!
In order to be successful in this you’ll need to:
Soon you’ll be able to join my free video training called “Create the body you’d love… without dieting” to get you started on the path to a healthy relationship with your body.
The only way to create a positive and sustainable change.
You’ll also be put in touch with a community of radiant women, just like you, who are done with disliking and judging themselves.
In the meantime, download ‘Why diets don’t work and what does” pdf to make sure you hear about my free upcoming video training.
Big Hug!
Tarisha
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