High fat, low carb, intermittent fasting, no fruit, no sugary foods, fruit only. It's no wonder people are so confused of what to eat. Fad diets have been around for a long time and continue to wreak havoc on millions of people every year. Diets encourage a temporary solution to weight loss and don’t focus on long-term results.  They are simply unrealistic, too restrictive, cost too much, and downright just complicated. 

There are so many reasons why diets don’t work, but the 3 reasons below are why the majority of dieters regain the weight back that they’ve lost within the first year.

 1.      Harmful to Our Health

First of all, dieting is a temporary food plan.  When people diet, they choose restrictive food plans that deprives them from not only quantity of calories but quality of calories.  When you go on a restrictive diet, it can lead to a diet-binge cycle.  As you decrease your caloric intake, your body doesn’t want you to starve, so it responds by slowing down your metabolism.  Your body also requires a certain amount of calories just in order for your body to properly function.  Your cardiovascular system, muscles, digestive system, and nervous system all require calories in order to work.  When you go on these restrictive caloric intake diets or low carb diets, you have less energy.  When you have less energy, you end up craving the foods that caused the problem in the first place so you begin the vicious cycle of ‘yo-yo’ dieting.  The cycle never ends unless you stop it and create a healthy dietary pattern.

 2.      Diets Are Not Fun

Eating is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves so why would we deprive ourselves of this simple pleasure?  One thing that diets have in common is self-deprivation and to be quite honest this never works.  You are told to give up foods for a certain amount of time to lose weight and then once you go back to eating them, you put the weight back on again.  The cycle never ends.  Along with removing certain foods from your daily diet, you can experience drastic mood swings, headaches, fatigue, and upsetting the digestive tract.  Who wants to feel this way?  The food you eat should leave you feeling happy, energetic, light, and clear-headed.

Remember, eating should be about the type of food you are eating, not the amount of food you are eating.  We need to rid our mindsets of reductionist style ways of thinking when it comes to our food.  If you are eating the right type of food, your hunger will always feel satisfied and your energy levels elevated all day long. 

 3.      Lack of Exercise

Our bodies are meant to move.  You can still lose weight from eating healthy but at some point, the body will hit a plateau with your eating habits and you will stop losing weight. Exercise is essential in long term weight management.  If you cut too many calories, you’re likely losing lean muscle mass rather than fat.  Since muscle burns more calories at rest, your body will get rid of it and hold onto to that fat to use for energy.  Do you really want to rid all that hard work of putting muscle on just to give it up because you’re not feeding your body enough calories?   Diets don’t care about sparing your muscle as long as you are buying into their pitch of purchasing their product.