Diets Make you Fat!

I have a great support team in my office.  We challenge each other for different exercises and health goals.  A couple of them are trying to quit smoking and walk more, while I have been focusing on trying to lose weight.  While our actual goals are not identical, we each have something we are working on together.

The other day one of these ladies presented us with this “Military diet” that she had downloaded from the internet. You know the type of diet I am talking about, this one claims to help you lose 20 lbs. in 2 weeks if you only eat certain food combinations for the next xyz days.    I have already fallen into that trap more than once so I opted to pass and keep with what I am doing.  I heard both gals complaining yesterday, one hadn’t lost any weight at all, in fact she was up three pounds by following the guidelines, the other had been losing weight and this diet made her hit a plateau.   They hit day four of the diet which is the day to eat your normal foods, and both of them ended up binging.

So what happened?  Why didn’t the crash program work for them?

Well let’s start off with what it had them eating…  

1.       Both ladies had to go to the store to buy the special foods for this diet, nothing on it was stuff they would normally eat.  

2.       Both of them tweeted/Facebooked complaints at their meals about how much they hated what they were being forced to eat, it was bland, it was a hated food etc….

3.       This pre-programmed diet was not designed to meet their individual needs. In both of these cases the amount of food was way off from their normal consumption, so their metabolism reacted accordingly.  In this case they went into starvation mode and once the food was available then their appetites turned back on, which prompted the binge.

Next let’s look at the routine:

1.       They denied themselves staples that their mind and body had come to expect.. This triggered the psychological response to want to focus on what you can’t have instead of what you can have.

2.       They took their systems out of their normal routine, which can throw off your rhythms; in this case it impacted their metabolism.

3.       They were on a program/routine that they had to “go off of”.  

Anytime you work on something that has a set end date, instead of working on lifestyle changes, you set yourself up to the mindset of “I only have to do this for …. longer.”  Once you go off a diet you slowly start to slip back into old habits which got you to the situation you are in now.  Only this time your body has just been through what it thinks is a “famine” and it sends out the signals to prep you for the next famine.  That is why so many dieters gain back not only the weight that they lost, but more.  Each time you crash diet your system sends the wrong message to your brain. So the more you crash diet, the more weight you gain after you end the diet.  It becomes a vicious cycle!

Remember you will never successfully keep the weight off from any program you have to go “off” of.  To truly lose weight and keep it off, you have to make lifestyle changes that you can maintain for the long term.