10 Reasons dieting is idiotic

1. Diets don’t work.
Maybe this is obvious, but if diets really worked you would only need one in your entire life. The reality is that diets are a short-term fix, like putting a Band-Aid on a cut when the bleeding is internal. Diets don’t solve the real problem.

2. You’ll probably gain weight.
Not at first, in the beginning you will lose weight. But studies have shown that in the long term, dieting is a reliable cause of weight gain. That’s right, even if you’re overweight you’re better off never dieting.

3. Diets make you miserable.
Calorie deficits make you grumpy. Nutrient deprivation makes me grumpy. I think there are better ways to spend our time, how about you?

4. Diets screw up your metabolism.
When you lose weight too quickly, you’re bound to lose some muscle. Also, when you dramatically decrease your calorie intake, your body adjusts to this lower level and learns to use less energy. These two strikes against your metabolism mean that when you go back to your old eating habits (if you’re lucky and don’t over compensate for your starvation by eating more, like most people) then you will store more calories as fat than ever before.

4. Diets make you a buzzkill.
Friends and family with restrictive diets ruin it for everyone. If you won’t even pretend to eat or drink what everyone else is having in celebration you make people uncomfortable in at least two ways: 1) they can tell you aren’t having as good a time as they are, which isn’t fun, and 2) they feel judged being less virtuous than you. Suffer on your own time.

5. Diets destroy your relationship with food.
Diets set you up for a feast or famine mentality, where you oscillate between barely eating anything and binging on 12-packs of deep-fried bacon-stuffed cupcakes. You can’t win.

6. The food tastes horrible.
Eating bad tasting food won’t kill you, but it’s hard to argue that you’re really living either.

7. Diets are hard.
Diets take lots of time, energy and self-discipline. They aren’t easy to keep up, and they’re nearly impossible to maintain. Since they don’t work, this is particularly unfortunate.

8. They’re temporary.
Even if you can stick out a diet and meet your weight goals, you know that as soon as you go back to your old habits the pounds will return (and probably bring some friends). So if it isn’t going to last, what’s the point exactly?

9. They cost money.
Not all diets are expensive, but chances are high that if you start one you will invest in a book or program, and probably special foods as well. It’s true that good food costs money, but do you need to pay extra to suffer and gain weight?

10. There’s a better way.
All the above inconveniences might be acceptable if weight loss is very important to you and there are simply no other ways to achieve it. But that isn’t true. Small, customizable lifestyle changes can transform your body and your health.

The changes are slower and much less dramatic, but they last because they are permanent. Losing a simple 2 lbs a month (.5 lb/week) will set you down almost 25 lbs in one year. More important, for most people a shift to healthier eating greatly improves quality of life. Not only do you get healthier and lose weight, the food is amazing and you discover a world of flavors and food culture you never knew existed.

Diet: A Four Letter Word

Diet vs. Dieting
We all know what it means to “go on a diet.” When you are dieting (the verb) you temporarily change how you eat–sometimes in ways that are very extreme–for the purpose of losing weight or achieving another immediate goal, like “detox.”

But we also use the word diet to describe normal, everyday eating patterns such as a “healthy diet” or “vegetarian diet.”

Failing to distinguish short-term and long-term eating behaviors is a serious problem though, because in reality most of us confuse these methods and try using short-term strategies to achieve goals that can only be met with a long-term approach. And describing and correcting this fallacy is almost impossible when the terminology we use is the same for both.

Dieting Is Temporary
To be clear, there are a few cases where dieting (short-term) can be beneficial. Sometimes an athletic event or other performance requires temporary weight loss or a special training program. But if your goal is long-term health or permanent weight loss, you won’t find much success with this approach.

Sure you can lose weight if you go on a diet. In fact, you can lose weight on almost any diet (I’m still skeptical of the cookie diet, but I would not be surprised if someone has lost weight on it). What you must remember is if your changes are temporary, so will be your success.

Worse, most temporary weight loss plans encourage rapid weight loss that ultimately destroys muscle and lowers your metabolism. This makes future attempts at weight loss even more difficult and may result in a net weight gain, once you have fallen off the bandwagon. In other words, you achieve the opposite of your goal.

The Maintenance Illusion
Deep down you probably know all this. Yet still we love to rationalize this behavior by telling ourselves that once we lose the weight, then we will switch to a healthier diet. We tend to associate “healthy diets” with weight maintenance, and we keep this idea in the back of our brains for the mythical time when we finally achieve our perfect, ideal bodies. But this strategy is backwards.

Habit
To lose weight and keep it off, to prevent chronic diseases and stay fit and active into old age, we need to permanently change our daily eating habits. We must learn to make healthier choices and gradually shift our behaviors to those of a healthy, thin person.

To change our bodies we must change our habits. And habits are created in our minds. We need to stop thinking of dieting as a way to achieve permanent weight loss. Instead we need a term that emphasizes our set of personal habits we adopt for long-term good health.

Healthstyle
This is the word I am choosing to describe the healthy habits that fit our own individual styles. One of the wonderful things about health and weight loss is that there are countless ways to get there. And what works for someone may not work for you. Healthstyle is your customized path to health that suits your personal tastes and lifestyle. Most importantly, Healthstyle emphasizes habits and long-term health, not painful diets and temporary weight loss.

By Darya Rose

Paul explains his gastric band program

You have been struggling to take control of your healthy fitness for a long time. Perhaps you even feel powerless to change. You have experienced all of the frustration and disappointment that comes from dieting.

You already know that dieting doesn’t work. If it did why would there be hundreds of diets to choose from? The reason it always fails is simple, dieting only focuses on the symptom instead of the problem.

The real problem is not what the scale says but rather how we think and what we most frequently think about. Dieting makes as much sense as surgeon treating appendicitis with only pain medicine or a gardener weeding a garden by trimming the weeds at ground level.

Hypnosis works because it gives you access to the hard drive, the subconscious, where behavior originates. Hypnosis gives you the unique ability to use your imagination to design how you look.

Hypnosis was approved by the AMA back in 1958. It has been scientifically researched for decades and consistent results support it as a legitimate tool empowering individuals to establish positive healthy change in their lives.

This uniquely effective gastric band hypnosis program puts you on the fast track to lasting fitness success. It is so effective because it powerfully blends the quick-fix success offered by real life gastric band surgery with the creative qualities of hypnosis.

By imagining with hypnosis that you have undergone gastric band surgery your inner thoughts begin to make changes with the choices you make. You comfortably start eating less and weighing less.

You are also guided to begin creating thoughts and images of the new fit healthy you. This positive approach helps you to begin anticipating and expecting the fitness success you desire. You have tried everything else now it is time to try hypnosis.

By: Paul Gustafson RN CH