Diets
Don't Work!
By Chad
Tackett (Sincere thanks to Chad for letting me reprint this
article here!)
Many Americans
view a healthy lifestyle as something difficult to attain
and something that's not much fun. Traditional diets
have taught us that to lose weight, we must limit our eating
and the kinds of foods we eat. Diets tell
us exactly what and how much food to eat, regardless of our
preferences and individual relationships with hunger and
satiety.
Dieting can help us lose weight (fat, muscle, and
water) in the short term but is so unnatural and so
unrealistic that it can never become a lifestyle that we can
live with, let alone enjoy!
While very few diets teach healthy low-fat shopping,
cooking, and dining-out strategies, many offer unrealistic
recommendations and encourage health-threatening
restrictions. Even more important, diets don't teach us the
safest, most effective ways to exercise; they don't teach us
how to deal with our cravings and our desires, or how to
attend to our feelings of hunger and fullness.
Eventually,
we become tired of the complexity, the hunger, the lack of
flavor, the lack of flexibility, the lack of energy, and the
feeling of deprivation. We quit our diets and gain back the
weight we've lost; sometimes we gain even more!
Each time we go on another diet of deprivation, the weight
becomes more difficult to lose, and we become even more
frustrated and discouraged. Then we eat more and exercise
less, causing ourselves more frustration, discouragement,
depression.
Soon we are in a vicious cycle. We begin to ask
ourselves, "Why bother?" We begin to blame
ourselves for having no will power when what we really need
is clear, scientifically-based information that will help us
develop a healthier lifestyle we can live with for the rest
of our lives.
Deliberate restriction of food intake in order to lose
weight or to prevent weight gain, known as dieting, is the
path that millions of people all over the world are taking
in order to reach a desired body weight or appearance.
Preoccupation with body shape, size, and weight creates an
unhealthy lifestyle of emotional and physical deprivation.
Diets take control away from us.
Many of us who diet get caught in a "yo-yo" cycle
that begins with low self-acceptance and results in
structured eating and living because we lack trust in our
body and are unwilling to listen and adhere to our body's
signals of hunger and fullness.
On diets, we distrust and
ignore internal signs of appetite, hunger, and our need to
be physically and psychologically satisfied. Instead, we
depend on diet plans, measured portions, and a prescribed
frequency for eating.
As a result, many of us have lost the ability to eat in
response to our physical needs; we experience feelings of
deprivation, then binge, and finally terminate our
"health" program.
This in turn leads to guilt,
defeat, weight gain, low self-esteem, and then we're back to
the beginning of the yo-yo diet cycle. Rather than making us
feel better about ourselves, diets set us up for failure and
erode our self-esteem.
The attitudes and practices acquired through years of
dieting are likely to result in a body weight and size
obsession, low self-esteem, poor nutrition and excessive or
inadequate exercise.
Weight loss from following a rigid diet
is usually temporary. Most diets are too drastic to
maintain; they are unrealistic and unpleasant; they are
physically and emotionally stressful. And most of us just
resume our old eating and activity patterns.
Diets control
us; we are not in control. People who try to live by diet
lists and rules learn little or nothing about proper
nutrition and how to enjoy their meals, physical activity,
and a healthy lifestyle.
No one can realistically live in
the diet mode for the rest of their life, depriving
themselves of the true pleasures of healthy eating and
activity.
MagicallySLIM
provides you with the right information, tools and resources
to lose and control your weight while eating what you want
to eat, when you want and as much as you want and most
importantly, automating your weight management task at a
subconscious level so you don't have to consciously worry
about it.
Click
Here to learn more about MagicallySLIM.
