5 Reasons Why Diets Don’t Work Long Term

 The media feeds you new reasons to diet with an advancing new year. It’s December, which is almost a national dieting month. A nutritional coach may have promised you a better life linked to the size of your body.

However, there are far too many challenges with dieting. Here dieting means all sorts of restrictions, not just food safety programs that claim to be diets. One thing can’t be ignored that diet programs employ one of the finest professional marketers. That’s why it’s more than a $67 billion industry. 

Well, we are here to analyze our diet mistakes and find 5 scientific reasons why diets don’t work long term.

1. Diets don’t sustain

We won’t mislead you. Yes, at the outset diets will help you lose weight. In the short-term, diets work. But there wasn’t a single study that establishes the long-term effects of a diet. It means people were able to maintain their diet and their weight loss for a brief period. A research conducted by a team running nutrition program in California reveals that 95% of people who diet end up gaining the weight back that they lost. More importantly, almost two thirds out of that 95%, will gain more weight than before. And then starts the awful restrictions/binging, yo-yo dieting cycle. A nutritional coach says that weight cycling i.e losing weight, gaining weight, causes more harm to our health than being obese. Dieting is actually a predictor of weight gain. 

2. Diets make you obsessive about food 

According to earlier research on a group of 36 men to observe the effects of food restriction, their calorie intake was halved for a period of six months. Not only did the researchers witness mood swings like irritability, fatigue, and lack of motivation, they also found a preoccupation with food. The men started stealing foods while others chewed up to 30 packs of gum per day. Even weird activities like licking the plates clean and holding food in their mouth for a period of time before swallowing were seen. Thinking about food all the time is only a biological reaction to restriction. It is normally be preoccupied with food as your body is hungry for fuel! There is nothing wrong with us. Only the right food has to be consumed during hunger, for which you can take professional guidance from food safety experts.

3. Diets lead to binging

Our weight loss plan in California came across many clients who nurse a myth that their binging is purely emotional and they are emotional eaters. But in reality, their binging is a biological reciprocation to deprivation. Your body generates chemicals to make you think about food while reciprocating to starvation. That chemical is called neuropeptide Y (NPY), which is secreted by the brain when you’re not availing sufficient calories and/or carbohydrates. NPY increases your appetite, delays satiety and stimulates food intake with a preference for carbs. Dieting and limitations imply not getting enough energy and enough carbohydrates, leading us to binge. This is one of the major diet mistakes.

4. Dieting is a kind of starvation

Our bodies are designed to protect us against starvation as we had to combat famines years and years ago. Presently, our bodies are oblivious to the fact that in the 21st century, we no longer need to hunt for our food. So by dieting, we prompt our bodies that there’s a famine going on at present. Help me survive. Accordingly, our bodies compensate to ensure that we live. This is why it’s challenging to lose weight each time you diet because your body is holding onto its fat stores and reducing your metabolism to let you survive. According to our camp conducting nutrition coaching in California, it is evident that your body is not the adversary here. The diet industry is. 

5. Dieting causes cravings

You are addicted to some food or the other. The basis of the food addiction theory model is that food shares common drug pathways in the brain and can trigger reward neurons. Those reward/pleasure centres light up even more in response to a food that was earlier been restricted. So when food is off-limits, like chocolate mousse, your brain is going to register that mousse as even more pleasurable than if it wasn’t constricted. As humans, we are regulated by our unfulfilled desires. 

 

Do not indulge in dieting just for the sake of it. As tobacco now comes with a warning on the label, causes cancer, diets too will come with their own warning: causes weight gain.