Why Are There so Many Diets to Choose From?

When you're thinking about losing weight, making a decision about which diet to choose can be rather tricky. The trouble is that there are so many diets on the market, that you don't know which ones are most likely to help you achieve your weight-loss goal. It doesn't help that many of the diet plans use statistics and endorsements from medical professionals to 'prove' that their diet works. Unfortunately, statistics can be manipulated and you don't usually know what credentials these medical 'professionals' actually have. At the end of the day, losing weight boils down to reducing your calorie intake so that it is less than your calorie expenditure.

As a consequence, it shouldn't really matter what type of diet you go on, if you're consuming fewer calories than you burn. Yet, there are still plenty of weight-loss 'experts' who create their own guides and plans which, if followed, will help you to lose weight quickly and stay slim. Of course, they rarely work, because the emphasis is always on short-term loss. You may well lose weight when you're enthusiastic and able to follow a diet plan to the letter, but these types of diet are usually so restrictive that it's not feasible to follow them in the long run. You therefore end up finishing your diet and going back to your normal eating habits.

This is one of the reasons why there are so many diets to choose from. People are so desperate to lose weight and to lose it quickly that they are prepared to try anything that offers them the prospect of being slim. They try one diet, lose weight, gain it all back again and are then on the look out for another diet plan which will again help them shed the excess pounds. Clearly, yo-yo dieting isn't exactly a solution to your weight problem, but it's easy to get trapped in this cycle, because nobody wants to continually monitor what they eat. If you don't, though; you could put on a couple of pounds here and a couple of pounds there and before you know it you're overweight or obese.

The diet industry is incredibly profitable for those peddling diet bibles and weight-loss guides, because there is a huge market for anything that could potentially help with weight control. Obesity rates have been on the rise over the past few decades and nobody wants to be fat, especially when it is socially frowned upon and comes with so many health risks. Thus, there are individuals who are willing to exploit people's desperation by coming up with a diet plan that will most likely lead to weight loss – based purely on the fact that you are only able to consume a small number of calories. People still buy into the idea that there is some kind of short cut to weight loss, when there isn't.

Mind you, when there is so much hype around the latest diet craze, it's hard not to be sucked into the idea that you could be skinny within a couple of months. You don't necessarily consider your ability to keep the weight off in the long term when you're on a diet, because you automatically assume that this won't be a problem. Obviously, you don't go on a diet with the intention of gaining lots of weight back after working so hard to lose it in the first place, but the reality is that this is often what happens. This is when you usually find yourself hunting for a new diet plan to follow.