Fad Diets - Why They Don't Work

The first thing that most people do when they decide that they want to lose some weight is to decide which diet will work best. There are a lot of popular diets on the market right now: the Atkins diet, the Ornish diet, the South Beach diet, the Zone diet, etc. and all of these diets insist that you have to drastically change your normal eating habits in ways that not only aren't natural but also in ways that leave you with mostly tasteless and inconvenient food options.

It is highly likely that if you choose one of these diets that you will lose weight while you follow the diet but before long, no matter how hard you try, the weight will come back and stay put. Even worse, it is likely that you will end up gaining more weight!

Studies done by the UCLA Psychology department have proved that these popular diets do nothing to help you keep your weight off, which is disenheartening because these same studies showed that people who follow these types of diets typically lose between five and ten percent of their body weight within the first six months of following the diets.

The same study showed that, while each of the subjects followed a different popular diet (though each diet insisted on the restriction of calories and severe restructuring of their diets), between one and two thirds of subjects ended up gaining back more weight than they lost within a few years of "completing" their diets.

The sad fact is that all of the study subjects would have been much better off had they not tried to follow one of those popular diets at all.

Other studies have been done that show the repeated cycle of weight loss followed immediately by weight gain can cause a number of maladies including (but not limited to) liver disease and high cholesterol levels. People who followed these diets were not only likely to gain back every single ounce they had shed, but they were also likely to gain extra weight on top of it all—ending up weighing a lot more than they did when they began their diets.

Many experts feel that dieting this way is hard on peoples' bodies and that if people knew they'd end up heavier than they were when they began these programs, they'd likely have never chosen the stress of dieting.

Of course not every attempt at weight loss results in failure. There are some people who manage to lose weight and keep it from coming back. These are the people who understood that there are some weight loss methods that work better than others.

Just about any diet that drastically lowers your calorie intake is likely to fail because you will feel starved all the time and will be more likely to cheat on the diet. The same is true for diets that force you to eat foods that you do not like or to give up foods that you love. Thankfully not all diets force people to do this and it is possible to diet and keep the weight off—if you diet correctly.