Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) (4 page)

STEP 1

Why Your Past Diet Attempts Have Failed

“
A minute’s success pays for the failure of years
.”

—
ROBERT BROWNING
, E
NGLISH POET

You know from reading the introduction that most diets fail because we’re addicted to sugars and carbohydrates. To help you understand overeating from this new angle and to equip you with strategies to break free from the cycle that may be keeping you overweight, it is important to see the common threads that emerge among diet failures. Why do so many of us have difficulty adhering to a healthy diet and maintaining our desired body weight? Understanding why things
don’t
work can help you see why the changes you will implement here
will
work, and end up working so well.

The Beginning of the End

As we’ve discussed, there are a vast number of diets on the market, all of which promise to help us lose weight and keep it off. Yet many of us have cycled on and off diets for the better part of our lives, with one failure after another. These diets clearly don’t work; if they did, we wouldn’t need to keep trying new ones. Plus, if one of them
really did work
, we would actually lose weight and keep it off, instead of remaining overweight, disappointed, and looking for a better solution.

While we tend to adhere to a particular diet for varying lengths of time, most diets don’t last very long. We usually throw in the towel within the first few weeks, often even within the first few days. We start out with determination, hope, and good intentions, so what happens during this time period that leads us right back to where we started? As it turns out, lots of things can happen during this initial dieting period that eventually lead to diet demise.

Normally, things start off well. We are motivated during the first few days. We make a conscious decision to lose weight, and we prepare to start “the diet.” Maybe we stock up on or make a mental list of “healthy” foods we plan to eat, or we mark the starting date on the calendar and announce it to our family and friends. Maybe we even enlist a diet partner who also wants to lose weight and get healthy. Those first few days are usually pretty successful, and we may even see a small amount of weight loss, which motivates us to continue.

Unfortunately, things quickly start to unravel. After just a few days, we get sick of eating “diet” foods and bored with the same mundane, flavorless tastes. We find ourselves feeling irritable, cranky, and easily annoyed (which, as you will see later, is probably a manifestation of withdrawal from the sugar-filled and
carbohydrate-rich foods that we are accustomed to overeating). The refrigerator stocked with the “diet” foods gets depleted, and other commitments to life, work, and family distract us from our eating plan. Our friend quits the diet (but resolves to start up again next month), so we are left to go it alone. We are hungry and unhappy. The results are slow to appear. It isn’t working, so we quit. We say to ourselves, “Maybe this particular diet wasn’t the one for me, so I will try a different one.” And the vicious cycle starts over again. Does any of this sound familiar?

Who Is to Blame?

Typically, when diets fail, the blame falls on the dieter. People might say that the dieter lacked willpower or that she was lazy. In most cases, the despondent, failed dieter also thinks it is her fault. All
sorts of rationalizations, excuses, and explanations might be made by the dieter at first (including blaming the diet itself for her inability to follow it), but in the end the finger of blame is usually pointed squarely at the person trying to lose the weight. And this feeling may be even more pronounced if the failed diet regimen required a lot of physical exercise.

This is not just conjecture; surveys suggest that people believe personal behaviors are the primary reason why so many people are overweight, rather than the amount of junk food available or other environmental factors.
¹
However, this commonly held belief is in contrast to scientific evidence, which is finding that societal changes over the past three decades, including our work schedules and food and beverage availability, are the driving factors behind the marked increases in body weight and obesity.

Unfortunately, self-blame is common. Alcoholics are blamed for their lack of resolve, and gamblers are blamed for not having enough self-control and responsibility. But it’s not that simple. Science has taught us that personal responsibility is part of a larger, more complicated puzzle, and some things are beyond our personal control. Addiction has a biological basis and is driven, at least in part, by changes in our brains. It can have a powerful influence over our behavior, and it can sabotage our attempts to regulate our behavior.

As a result, failed dieters should not necessarily bear all of the blame. As you will learn in this book, the cause of being overweight is not simply limited to our willpower; other causes may include our biochemistry and the potentially addictive nature of some types of food. Willpower is certainly part of staying on track, and we need to have willpower and dedication to succeed at our health goals, but it may only take us so far. Other factors, like addiction, can dramatically weaken willpower no matter how steadfast and devoted we think we are to a diet.

With the help of scientific research, we are beginning to understand that weight gain is closely tied to our chemistry as opposed to being an indication of our character. For example, studies have revealed that certain genes are linked to obesity, and these genes may predispose certain individuals to overeat.
²
Much as there is a genetic component to alcoholism, some people may have a genetic drive to want to eat too much of certain types of foods, and genetics can be a tough opponent for willpower. Additionally, our modern-day food environment is filled with many foods and associated stimuli that can weaken our willpower to resist them.

Just Being on a Diet Sets You Up for Failure

Another reason diets fail is because of the term
diet
. The word
diet
gets tossed around pretty casually in everyday conversation, and it is often used in different contexts. In this book,
diet
is used, for lack of a better word, to mean the food that you regularly consume and live off of. We prefer the phrase
eating plan
over
diet
, but since
diet
is used most often colloquially, for the sake of simplicity it will be used here as well.

You might wonder: what is so wrong with saying
diet
? The phrase
going on a diet
is normally used to describe what you do when you want to lose weight. The problem is that saying that you are going on a diet suggests that at some point you will go off of it. Psychologically, a diet connotes a temporary process; once you lose the weight and meet your health goals, you can go back to eating the way you used to. You just need to get through these next few weeks, or months, and then the suffering and inconvenience will be over, and a slimmer, healthier you can go back to enjoying all of the
foods that you want, including those “forbidden foods” that diets typically eliminate.

Here is the bad news: this is not going to happen.

Although it isn’t always obvious and they often make it look effortless, people who are thin and in good shape
don’t
get to eat insane amounts of junk food and give into every food desire they have and still look that way. Maybe they indulge once in a while, but in order to stay slim, they most likely have developed an eating strategy that allows them to stay that way permanently. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, a diet needs to be a
way
of eating, not a short-term solution.

Quick Fixes Don’t Work

Many diet programs out there are quick fixes: drink this mysterious liquid for seven days and you will lose fifteen pounds and end up slim and happy, just like the model in the advertisement. While that sounds like the ideal situation, the truth is, quick fixes don’t last. If the lack of success with other diets you have tried is not enough to convince you, consider this: sure, you can go
on
a diet and maybe you will lose weight, but once you go
off
that diet, the weight will creep back on and you will be back to square one, sometimes with even more to lose. This cycle is evident from the rampant yo-yo dieting seen in our society, and the weight regain that is all too common among dieters. Research also shows that people who use quick-fix approaches to weight loss, such as skipping meals and taking diet pills, are actually more likely to have an increase in their body mass index (BMI, a measure used to determine whether a person is normal weight, overweight, or obese) than those who don’t.
³
This
underscores the futility of these quick-fix attempts. Diets, as we know them, just don’t work.