The Habit of Permanent Weight Loss
Every year more and more people go on a diet and yet the number of people who are overweight continues to rise. Diets are clearly working for the diet industry, but not for dieters. The question has to be asked - do diets work? Going on a diet can result in short-term weight loss, but diets fail to deliver what every dieter desperately wants to achieve, and that is permanent weight loss.
Permanent weight loss is very elusive. The majority of people who go on a diet never achieve it. What diets fail to address are the reasons why weight gain occured in the first place.
Traci Mann, who is a psychologist at UCLA has been doing some very interesting work on the effectiveness of diets. She didn’t take just one or two diets, she studied 31 - and over a period of between two and five years. What she discovered is that for the majority of people, diets don’t lead to better health benefits or sustained weight loss.
So what can you expect if you go on a diet? Short-term weight loss is the short answer. You may be able to lose up to 10% of your body weight. You might think that’s a pretty good result until you realise that within a very short space of time you will have put the weight back on again - with interest! This is what happens in the majority of cases - well over 90% in fact.
We live in interesting times. Change is happening all around us and is accellerating every day, yet we seem to be reluctant to embrace change when it comes to our own lives. Scientists - specifically neuroscientists and psychologists - have made some amazing discoveries in recent years: discoveries that have opened up the workings of how our brain and body function and interact, for example. They have given us the opportunity to use this new found knowledge to develop ways of helping us to make change by learning new habits - slim habits, if you like.
Weight loss programs need to be far more than calorie restrictive regimes. They need to be programs of learning and discovery. We have to enter into the process not as spectators who expect things to happen to us, but as participants that meke things happen. They need to have structure and a means to provide support if they are to make any real and lasting difference.
A new, slim and healthy life awaits those who are prepared to come to terms with their behaviors and to make real and lasting change. Learning new habits, new slim habits is the way forward.
For those struggling to lose weight permanently, the big weight could soon be over.
Tags: get healthier, losing weight fast, shaping up, fitness
Posted in fat loss