| People always ask me why I say that they don’t really have a chance to permanently lose weight on a diet. They say that they, and people they know, have lost 20 or 30 pounds on a low carb or low fat diet or have joined organizations and go to meetings or take pills or diet supplements and achieved great success. They are thrilled and tell me that I’m all wrong about dieting; that their diet is terrific and they are going to permanently “keep off” the 30 or 40 pounds or whatever the number of pounds they have lost and always weigh what they weigh now. Well, I say that they don’t really have a chance because that is exactly what the statistics say. The results of virtually every study of dieters indicate that in excess of 95% of all people who “lose weight” on diets eventually gain it all back. I think it’s probably closer to 99%. Indeed, how many people do you know PERMANENTLY weigh 30 or 40 pounds less than they used to? Probably very few, if any. Don’t forget that the low carb diet was first publicized about 180 years ago. In the 1960’s it was called “The Drinking Man’s Diet”. There was also the Scarsdale Diet. It has had lots of reincarnations. What was the long term result? Almost no one permanently lowered their weight. What proof do I have? Just look around you. Everywhere you look everyone is talking about obesity and low carb diets as if they are something new. They’re not. All diets are based on some kind of deprivation, which deprives people of some foods that they were eating for emotional reasons. Sooner or later those emotional needs will overcome the rational desire to weigh less and the dieters will no longer be able to adhere to the regimen of deprivation. That’s exactly what has always happened and it will happen again. The only reason people weigh more than they want to is that they have been using food in an attempt to satisfy their emotional needs. After all, why would they put all that food in their mouths when they knew it would make them fat? They didn’t want the food in their system. They just wanted it in their mouths and it was more important to them to put the food in their mouths than to weigh less. That’s the problem. It always has been the problem and it always will be. That’s why you have to eliminate eating for emotional reasons to permanently weigh less. |
