Why People Set Themselves Up for Failure by Going on a Diet

When people go on a diet, they generally see it as a positive step to enable them to get back in control of their weight. They do not want to contemplate the possibility of failure and so try to ignore the fact that they have been on many diets before and had limited success or that most people who go on a diet are unable to keep off any weight they lose. Clearly, if you have followed lots of different fad diets in the past and failed to maintain a healthy weight it might be a wise idea to take a different approach to weight loss, rather than going on yet another diet.

If you are able to stick to a diet, then you're going to lose weight, but most of the diets that are on offer are all about offering a quick-fix. In the long run, to make sure you don't regain the weight you lose, you have to adapt to different eating habits. When you go on a diet you are basically setting yourself up for failure, since you never learn what kind of eating and exercise habits you need to adopt, choosing, instead, to rely on a diet that you can only stick to for a few weeks or months.

You may lose weight quickly when you go on a diet, which makes you happy for a short amount of time. However, once you come of a diet, you treat yourself, having deprived yourself for awhile, and then fall back into the very eating habits that caused your weight problem in the first place. Your body is going to be even more inclined to hold on to the extra calories you give it, having starved it of essential nutrients for weeks or months at a time. The quick results you get from dieting may be appealing, but, really, it is just a waste of your time.

Although you may be ecstatic with how fast you are able to lose weight, so that you are extremely motivated and have no difficulties sticking to the rules of a diet, eventually you have to go back to your normal life. You want to be able to enjoy yourself on a night out with friends and to eat what you want when you go to a restaurant. When you start gaining weight, denial may become a problem, so that you avoid stepping on the scales, since if you don't know how much you weigh, you don't have to deal with it. You're left feeling despondent and maybe even embarrassed about your weight gain, having enjoyed the compliments on your previous weight loss.

To prevent this happening, it is important to recognise that diets are not the solution. They may be relatively easy to follow for a short period of time, as you are able to see results very quickly and you don't really have to think much about what to eat. However, when you come off a diet, your normal, everyday life catches up with you, and you just go back to whatever is most familiar. When you have always used diets to 'control' your weight, it can be difficult to break the cycle of weight gain and weight loss, but, in the long term, it is better for your health to stop aiming for rapid weight loss and, instead, take steps that will facilitate sustainable weight loss.