Why People Get Trapped in a Cycle of Gaining and Losing Weight

For most people it is far easier to gain weight than it is to lose it and far more enjoyable! To gain weight, all you have to do is eat too much and drink too much whilst doing very little exercise, something which many are able to do with ease. All it takes is for a holiday abroad or Christmas and New Year's celebrations for them to overdo it and gain weight. Making the effort to lose weight is much more challenging, but has to be done if you don't want to end up with a wardrobe full of clothes that no longer fit.

You know that losing weight is going to be hard, because it means having to make a number of changes to your usual way of doing things. You can no longer just eat whatever you feel whenever you please or go out with friends and get drunk every weekend. When losing weight is such a hassle, you just want it to be over with as quickly as possible and so instead of looking to make long-term changes it is more convenient to aim for rapid weight loss by going on a diet. There are, after all, plenty of diets on the market which claim to be able to help.

Unfortunately, virtually all of these diets are designed with the short term in mind. They are not there to help you to control your weight, but rather to encourage you to lose weight as quickly as possible by getting you to cut your calories down to a very low amount. Of course, you're bound to lose weight when you're more-or-less starving yourself, but you won't be able to keep it up for long and as you grow increasingly despondent it becomes much easier to give into temptation. Sticking to a diet may not be a problem when you're motivated, but usually this motivation doesn't last long.

It doesn't help that most diets are very prescriptive and provide you with restrictive meal plans that don't exactly give you much choice. You get bored of eating the same meals every day, especially when everyone around you is able to eat what they want. It isn't long before you're back to your former ways, eating large quantities of junk food and not even pausing to consider your calorie intake. The end result is always weight gain, which usually leaves you feeling miserable, because you feel that you've let down all the people who had been complimenting you on your weight loss.

Sometimes, this can fuel binge eating, which only exacerbates the problem. At some point or another you will once again come to the decision to lose weight and quite often you will try to shed the extra pounds by going on a diet. The trouble is that you become fixated on losing weight as quickly as possible without considering whether you will actually be able to keep the weight off. To successfully maintain a healthy weight, however, you have to embrace healthier habits which are not advocated in any diet plan. Otherwise, you find yourself trapped in a cycle of losing and gaining weight.