Trying for weight loss is frustrating. For the overwhelming majority, it’s just beyond discouraging. After so many attempts, you give up. You lose hope. You accept your ultimate and imminent defeat. Here at Strive Fitness and Performance, we here this all the time and the truth is, people do not have to feel defeated when it comes to weight loss.
Weight Loss Diets are a joke. And if you think that trying the latest and greatest fad diet will finally be the answer to your weight loss journey, you’re wrong. Every diet does work to a certain degree, for a little while. They force you to monitor your food, your calorie intake, your macros, and even limit the types of food you can eat. In the short term, yes you’ll lose some weight. But there are reasons why you’ve failed, and why you keep failing.
Diets Are Unrealistic
You’re excited. You’ve decided that today is the day. You’re going on a diet. You’re going to prep all your meals so that instead of having cravings and hitting up the drive-thru on the way home from work you can start eating healthy well-balanced meals and finally start losing weight. This may last for a few days, maybe even a week, but what happens when you forget your lunch and Janet from HR brings in donuts or you have a family get-together over the weekend? You’ve got to eat, right? I’m guessing that this new diet of yours, probably doesn’t include donuts as a preferred food choice. And now that you’ve eaten three of them, you feel awful and BOOM! Your diet is dead.
The point – is that things happen. You get busy, you get stuck in traffic, you miss meals, you end up eating your kids' mac and cheese instead of your dinner, etc. And unless you’re a billionaire who has a personal chef and gets to eat organic chicken farm to table every day, with a side of garden fresh organic kale then you’re stuck figuring out whether or not you want to eat left over spaghetti, or a frozen pizza like the rest of us.
Diets Turn Into Binge Eating
The first step to an unsuccessful diet is creating a lifestyle you and your body is not used to. For example, if you don’t regularly workout and eat healthily, then going from grabbing the most convenient food when you’re hungry, to having to cook all your meals, and hitting the gym after work when you don’t know what you’re doing is doomed. Breaking bad habits can be hard. And breaking them all at once can be extremely overwhelming. If your body is accustomed to ingesting 4,000 – 5,000 calories per day of crappy food, going to an extreme weight loss diet of lets say 1,000 or so calories will get results for the short term. Your body will respond with massive cravings and a slower metabolism to boast. When you give in to those cravings, or even just start to eat a little more. You will then gain weight, without even trying.
There Are No Quick Fixes
Calorie deficits or the exclusion of certain foods is how the majority of fad diets typically work. Restricting yourself to eating specific foods, and restricting others, can work, of course, however that will never work in the long run if you’re trying to live a well-balanced healthy life that’s actually sustainable. Read more about how "fad" diets fail for long term results. By restricting certain types of foods like carbs, fat, sodium, chest, milk, or trying to keep track of everything you eat and replacing it with unhealthy alternatives, you’re putting a band-aid on a problem, that stems much deeper and that requires a multi-faceted solution.
The Takeaway
Taking small steps and hitting realistic milestones in your health and fitness, is the only way you can change your lifestyle, obtain weight loss and avoid making the mistakes you’ve made in the past. Think of it. If you aim for changing one thing at a time, more than likely, you will accomplish this and then probably two other good habits. You think it is amazing (and it is) because you just did 3 things that you never thought possible. Now flip that scenario and have a goal of changing 4-5 things. You still accomplish those same 3 good habits. This time however, you see yourself as a failure because you did not accomplish your goal of 4-5 things. See where I am going here?
When we are trying to change our lifestyle and focus on weight loss, it is going to be very very hard. It order to accomplish everything in the long run, you will need to have some positive results. If you focus on accomplish and succeeding one step at a time, you will see all the positive and none of the negative things. I promise!!!
