Why it is Difficult to Get Away from the Mentality of 'Dieting.'

Every time you go on a diet you hope that this time you will lose weight and be able to keep it off, but in the back of your mind there are always doubts. When you have lost weight so many times before only to gain it all back again you can't help but think that no matter how successfully you are able to shed the pounds, you're never going to be able to maintain your ideal weight. This attitude doesn't exactly make keeping the weight off any easier, but then nor does going on a diet in the first place.

If you want to manage your weight in the long term you have to get away from dieting and focus, instead, on introducing lifestyle changes that are there to stay forever and which will help you keep your calorie intake under control. However, it can be difficult to get away from the mentality of dieting when this is what you're used to. If you have always watched your weight going up when you stop paying attention to what you eat, then going down when you put yourself on a very-low calorie diet you might not know how to do things differently.

Consequently, you use diets to help you manage your weight. You don't want to get too heavy, but you don't want to give up the eating habits you have, either. Thus, as a compromise you swap your usual eating habits for a short period of time, so that you no longer consume as many calories. You end up eating a limited range of food in very small quantities, which obviously results in significant weight loss. You can't keep to such a diet for long, though, and once you're bored with the diet or close to your weight-loss goal you just give up and go back to eating what you normally eat.

You don't mind sticking to a diet for a short period of time when the results you get are so noticeable. You like being able to step on the scales and see that you've lost seven pounds in a week, even though this amount of weight loss is extremely difficult to sustain in the long run. The main reason for going on a diet is usually to lose weight quickly, and so you don't give that much consideration to what happens afterwards. This is why you tend to pile on the pounds once you abandon your diet, since you have not re-trained yourself to make wiser food choices.

Even though you may be aware of what you need to do in order to lose weight and avoid gaining it all back again, you can easily get trapped in a cycle of bingeing on food and dieting. When all your friends are on diets and you don't have the knowledge, patience or willpower to take a different approach, you find yourself just relying on the methods of weight loss most familiar to you. You struggle to shake off the mentality of dieting, despite knowing there is a significant chance you will end up just as heavy as before.