Why Do Diets Fail?

Why do diets fail? If you have ever tried to lose fat and couldn’t keep up with dieting, then keep reading this. 

1. Goal setting / Setting the right expectations: 

While scrolling through our social media feed, we come across pictures of different celebrities who have those chiseled six pack abs or bikini body. We look at their pictures and decide ‘Okay! I too want to look like them’. But what happens is we often neglect our current situation. If we are somebody who is on higher side of body fat% and we face difficulty in doing even on day to day activities, then our goal should be to get functional first. Once you have lean down and able to perform those activities set new goals then. In other words, instead of setting a big goal, break down your goal into different small goals and achieve them one by one. This will keep you motivated throughout your journey.

2. Designing your nutrition/diet plan: 

Selecting a diet is not like buying a dress from a mall like this one looks prettier I’ll go with it. Just because you read a random article on the internet that this diet is best for fat loss that doesn’t mean it will work for you as well. If you are somebody who is confused between high carb, low carb or keto, then ask yourself one question, ‘Which diet is going to be most sustainable for me?’. If you have a habit of eating carbs in all the meal, then it won’t be the right approach to completely cut off carbs from your diet and go for keto. Or if you have been comfortable with high-fat diets then introducing too many carbs in the diet in one go won’t be the right choice. So, after calculating the targeted calories according to your goal, your next step is to figure out what diet will work better for you or which diet you will be able to sustain most.

3. Let the dieter control the diet not diet controlling the dieter:

Dieting has both physiological and psychological part of it, and as we diet, we not only build physiological stress, but we also go through psychological stress too. That’s the reason if not done with the right approach we often put on the lost fat again. One of the ways to manage this is by targeting 1-1.5% of weight loss per week of your body weight and dividing your weight loss journey into various phases by including regular diet breaks. As we diet our body start seeing certain adaptations to the diet and diet breaks help to keep those adaptations away up to some extent. Not only this, but diet breaks are also psychological relieving since they allow the dieter to eat at maintenance or in slightly surplus calories, which means a little more food from what the diet has been eating in a deficit. 

So instead of thinking to break the entire mountain in one go, divide it in small blocks and then break those blocks one by one. This will keep us more motivated, more disciplined and less stressed.

4. Accountability: 

Some of us know all the science but when it comes to executing it we lack the discipline. The solution to this problem can be honesty. Create an accountability sheet and write down everything there, like ‘whether you followed the diet completely today, whether you did your decided workout for the day, did you complete the targeted fluid intake’. Mark everything as yes or no every day and if the answer is no write down the reason next to it. By the end of the week, you will have your own journal and by looking at it you will be able to understand where you went wrong. Not only this, but you can also ask one of a friend who can help you with the accountability and send him/her regular updates.
 

Stay Healthy... Stay Blessed!