Diet’s Don’t Work. Seriously. They Don’t.

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There is a commercial on for Weight Watchers these days that says “Diets don’t work; Weight Watchers does.” I’ve never done Weight Watchers personally, so I don’t know how true that is, but I do definitely agree that diets don’t work. What works is eating the right foods and the right amounts — having a well balanced diet.

In terms of diets though, I’ve tried them all. I read The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet from cover to cover about 10 years ago. The idea was interesting but not for me. At the time, I was a vegetarian and couldn’t figure out how to make the diet work for me. It called for proteins that I didn’t eat and disallowed many vegetables and fruits in the first few weeks. That book is still in my bookcase but I have no interest in reading it.

Nonetheless, a few years later I did the Atkin’s Diet for several months. It worked great. I lost a ton of weight on it — so much, in fact, that friends told me that I needed to stop because I was looking “gaunt”. No lie. The bigger problem with the diet was that I felt so deprived on it. I tried making no carb bread and ended up with a brick. A dry brick. I missed sugar, fruit, bread, pasta, rice . . . And try as I might to make it a lifestyle change, I just couldn’t.

Those weren’t my first forays into dieting. The first time I remember trying a diet was just for fun when I was 11. It was the Cabbage Soup Diet, then known as an American Heart Association Diet. I ate the cabbage soup with glee and munched on only fruits, then only vegetables, then fruits and vegetables . . . but I never made it past day three on several attempts. Again, it worked — I lost weight in those days — but it wasn’t a long term solution (and admittedly, at 11, I didn’t need to lose weight anyway. But I did try it when I was older and had the same results.).

I even did a risky low calorie diet in college where I limited calories to an unhealthy level for three weeks. I lost (and managed to keep off) quite a bit of weight and basically reset my appetite, but knowing now what I didn’t want to know then, I know that diets like that are the enemy.

Anyway, I have tried low calorie, low fat, carb free and fads. I have exercised incessantly.  But as Shawn says, until you are ready to make that lifestyle change nothing will work in the longterm.

I am ready. We are ready.

And the best thing about what we are doing? We aren’t dieting. We are eating better. We are eating with both eyes open. Knowing that an afternoon snack for the sake of snacking is $300 of my daily $1,500 to $1,850 is a very good deterrent if I am not truly hungry. And we aren’t feeling deprived or like we are sacrificing either. We are just eating better.

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