For the first few days you feel super motivated. It’s awesome. You might even lose a few pounds.

You think to yourself, “Maybe this time is different. I’m really going to do this.”

Maybe that motivation even carries over for a few weeks.

You keep on restricting yourself, rejecting your hunger, feeding yourself low-fat, low calorie meals and snacks packaged in cardboard or wrappers—lots of packaging—while you tally up your daily calories or points, and punch in 60 min on the treadmill to cap off another day in the life of a dieter in denial.

“I can keep it up,” you say to yourself.

And maybe you do. For a week or two, it’s relatively smooth sailing. hard work, but motivating. You feel good and you’ve probably lost a few. But then something happens. An unplanned business trip…or you catch a cold (because it’s that time of year)…or there’s a string of social engagements you didn’t plan for…or even just one night out with our friends that spirals into hedonism on berserk.

The list of triggers is endless. But the conclusion is always the same: You veer from the plan, and the next day you wake up feeling like a failure.

Hopelessness creeps in ever so slightly. Suddenly, you’re not as motivated as you were. The “few days off” leave you wondering if you can do this. The mind games you play with yourself won’t shut up. That voice in your head gets louder and more opinionated. You’re trying to keep up with the diet but you start to lose steam. Life gets in the way. You fall off track. The urgency you initially felt just sort of…disappears. And then your motivation dies altogether.

You give up.

Why does this happen?

Because you’re only motivated when it’s easy. It’s easy to follow a new diet for a few days. The novelty of the experience makes it fun and exciting and, well, easy!

But then life interferes and we know what happens. We just rehearsed it. Work gets super stressful, relationships become challenging, a “bad weekend” spirals into a bad week. You lose touch with your diet because you were never connected to the experience to begin with.

You were only connected to the result: “I HAVE TO lose 15 pounds…20 pounds…30 pounds…”

The problem is that the result is very far away, which means you’re only connected to your imagination. And when reality doesn’t catch up to your imagination quickly enough, you’ll find all sorts of excuses to give up. Especially when you’re thrown a curve-ball that doesn’t conform to your imagined expectations.

So now what?

Well, for starters, you’ve learned that you can follow the rules…until you can’t follow the rules anymore. “Ah, damnit! The diet instructions didn’t cover that.”

As soon as real life gets in the way and the rules need re-writing, what happens then? You feel overwhelmed and lost. You give up sooner than later. You go back to your old routine

…Oh, and the weight you lost? It comes back. Immediately.

How many times have you gone on a diet?       

Let’s be real for a minute. How many times? How many times have you tried dieting? 5? 10? Maybe you’re always “sort of on a diet.” Maybe the past 5 years have been one great big perpetual diet.

You’ve proven you can “diet.” Congratulations. That means you’ve proven diets don’t work. This isn’t breaking news. Have you ever asked yourself why diets don’t work?

The numbers are pretty bad. When it comes to dieting, 95% of us fail. 95! The number seems ridiculous, and it may be inaccurate, but the point is clear: we don’t inherently suck (that’d be pretty sad), diets just don’t work.

I think it’s safer to say that 95% of diets fail us. They don’t address the heart of the issue.

Too many of us treat dieting as all-or-nothing.

You’re either in or you’re out, and you hate it when you’re in and you hate yourself when you’re out. When things get stressful, or life gets in the way, you’ll often unintentionally divert your attention for a split second and slip up. A cookie here, a piece of candy there. One “cheat” turns into an entire weekend free-for-all. The week begins, you try to get back into the diet, but slowly you subconsciously undermine yourself one snack, one meal, at a time.

Before you know it, you’re using your own missteps to rationalize why dieting doesn’t work. Your motivation dies. Because you’re only motivated when it’s easy. So you give up. You fall back into old default settings—the same old routine as always—and nothing’s changed.

Sound familiar? 

It gets worse. For those of us who have an obsessive or abusive relationship with food, the problem runs deeper. One slight variation from that all-or-nothing approach, one small mistake, can lead to total self-sabotage. Feelings of guilt, shame, and failure feed on pleasure, comfort and safety. A nasty, seemingly unsolvable loop.

And yet, we all subject ourselves to this same dieting mentality and protocol time and time again. You know the definition of insanity, right? Trying the same process repeatedly and expecting a different outcome.  

What’s going on here? 

Self-sabotage. This self-defeating loop is what behavioral scientists call a pattern of self- sabotage.

Pause for a second and ask yourself the following question: “What has to be true in my life in order for me to repeatedly sabotage my weight loss efforts?” 

Disregarding psychology, and looking strictly at your behavior—at a very practical level, your current set of habits MUST be true in order for you to continuously sabotage yourself. Right? Distributed over the course of a day, over the course of a week, over the course of a month, your current set of habits dictate how you engage with your environment.   

In her best-selling book, Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin elaborates: “Habits are the invisible architecture of our daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future.”

Most of the choices we make on a daily basis feel like the result of well-considered decision making, but aren’t. They’re habits. Although each habit might mean relatively little, over time, the meals we order, the places we shop, our route to work, how often we exercise, and the way we depend on external stimuli for solutions impacts our health, weight, productivity, mood, relationships and happiness. These habits become our “default settings.”

Over your entire life, you’ve conditioned yourself to respond to certain environmental and emotional triggers by eating specific types of foods. This isn’t rote behaviorism: you’ve conditioned your mindset to believe you need these foods to feel better. Which conditions the way you think about yourself, and your health. Once set in place, it’s really hard to see outside of the paradigm you’ve built up. Your poor eating habits are 100% the cause of this evolutionarily-engrained operating system—the habit loop.

The Take-Away: While it’s important to create new habits, even more important is how to change old ones. Those are what’s holding you back from changing your life. It’s what held 13/14 of the contestants back in The Biggest Loser, as I wrote about here.

Adding a new set of habits to your life won’t erase the old ones. We have to address those directly. And we can. And we will. This is why crash diets ALWAYS fail. Diets aren’t smart enough. They’re not dynamic. That’s why when you try to fit them into your life, life always ends up winning. You go back to your default setting, to your old routine—because you didn’t try to change the routine to begin with.

Why Diets Fail

Diets fail because they’re inherently contradictory. They demand you to fit a new set of instructions (the diet itself) into your old lifestyle. Instead, you should be working toward building a new lifestyle. This takes time, direction and concentration.

Diets promise short-term solutions: “try our 10-day quick-fix, magic elixir, ultra-secret, fat-scorching solution!”  

…Sounds great, but what happens after 10 days?

Think of it this way: diets are like cramming for a test. You might pass the test but what did you get out of it?  Do you really think that you’ll be able to override and entire lifetime’s worth of habits with a new set of rules in a snap of the finger?

The answer is No. And if you’ve ever tried and failed a diet before, that’s proof.

And yet that’s what all of these commercial diets promise. What you find is that life always wins: it’s too hard to cram in this new diet without first changing your lifestyle…which means changing your habits. (Don’t worry, I will teach you how to do all of this.)

Even worse: diets deprive you of essential nutrients and make you hate the process of “going on a diet.”   

Restriction, calorie counting, poor-quality, “convenience.” Do you really think that you have a chance when the diet itself—the supposed solution—deprives you of essential nutrients, disregards the intricacies of hormonal signaling, saps you of energy, makes you hungry all the time, promotes obsessive calorie counting, is designed to make you crave what you’re not supposed to want, teaches you to hate the process and learn nothing, and sets you up for burn-out and exhaustion?

I’ll let you think on that.

No, actually I’m going to spell it out for you.

Diets fail because sooner than later, you come to find that the new routine you’re trying to replace your entire lifetime of poor behaviors with—the diet itself—isn’t serving you. It’s leaving you hungry, frustrated, and craving all the foods you’re not “allowed” to eat. What’s worse, it doesn’t meet the expectations, dynamism, and demands of reality. You get distracted or overwhelmed or burnt out and either quit immediately or soon thereafter, or pretend that you’re still dieting by being “on” during the day and completely “off” at nights.

Sooner than later, you slip into your old routine, your old set of habits. You’re eating too much, you feel hopeless, and you’re right back where you started, or even farther behind.

Back to Our Friends, The Biggest Losers

To follow up on this article I wrote, the contestants went from one extreme (obese) to the other (obsessed), which damaged them mentally, physically and, after relapse, emotionally as well. Habitually, what were the take-aways from their transformation? That being healthy means you need to kill yourself with excessive exercise and deprive yourself of food?

Look, I get why it’s inspiring television: the show is supposed to motivate an audience to care about their health. But what about the sequel? What about the TV show that depicts 13/14 of the contestants’ regressions? Not so inspiring. The melodrama of the show sets up millions of people to adopt this crash dieting mentality, reinforcing the lie that deprivation and restriction is the only way to actually lose weight.

The Take-Away

The dieting mentality proves that: 

  1. Our relationship with food is fundamentally damaged at a societal level: the stuff we eat is marketed to us for all the wrong reasons; we eat way too many carbs, way too many refined grains and hydrogenated oils, and not enough protein or fats.
  2. Our relationship with food is deeply engrained in us, and has caused all sorts of physical, emotional, and mental dependencies – which makes adopting a new diet EXTREMELY difficult.
  3. Our understanding of all the factors involved to build a sustainably healthy life are overlooked or ignored for sensationalist hooks and short-term results.
  4. The institutions we rely upon to support us are either confused, archaic, or influenced by interest groups that don’t actually care about our health.
  5. We don’t know how to solve the nation-wide weight epidemic, because the intended solution that’s pushed on us from the media (“dieting”) ultimately sabotages our efforts.
  6. We try to diet in attempt to reverse an entire lifetime’s worth of poor eating habits, and set ourselves up for repeated failure.
  7. When given the opportunity, most people like to live inside their imagination (wishing upon success) more than they like to do the work.

The pervasiveness of these factors at a macro-societal and micro-individual level is why we keep failing at this diet and lifestyle thing, over and over and over again. It’s why you haven’t gotten it right, and can’t seem to figure it out.

There’s no weight loss secret. 

The secret is that you’ve got the process all backward.

At EvolutionEat, we don’t go hungry. Again, this is not a diet but a way of life. By keeping full and energized, you won’t feel like you’re making such a “sacrifice” that dieting typically inspires. In fact, at the beginning of your evolution I suggest that you eat way more of the good stuff and never feel tempted by the bad. That’s an important operating principle to live by. The idea is to feel inspired by the process, to enjoy it, to look forward to it, to cultivate a new and rewarding relationship with food.

The idea is not to restrict and count points and count calories and obsess about the bullshit.

Going on another diet is not the solution.

Obesity, overweight, emotional eating, sugar dependencies—they’re all fixable, and anyone who tells you that you have to starve yourself and exercise until your joints hurt to lose weight and “be healthy” is full of it.

We’re going to do just the opposite: eat good food and plenty of it. We’re going to reform your relationship with food. It will change your life.

After EvolutionEat, you’ll never have to diet again.

I created an online training program just for you. It contains 3 hours of my best material, and I’m giving it to you for free. Sign up for it by clicking here.

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