What Do You Expect From A Diet?

To the question: What do you expect from a diet? The answer is not as simple as you may think. The quick answer is to say, ‘I expect to lose weight’, but that’s like answering the question; what do you expect from a meal? with the answer; ‘I expect some food’. Neither answer really addresses the question.
People diet for all sorts of reasons. They want to build up their self esteem. They want to catch the eye of someone special. They want to look good for the wedding or some special event. They want to get back into their clothes. They want to rekindle the romance in a marriage. They want to get their energy back. They are worried about their health. They just want to look good right now. These are all short term goals and people know they can only expect a short term solution. Chances are you know the weight will be back, but you do not want to be reminded of that before you have lost the weight.
Very few people ever expect to get a permanent weight loss. What most people do expect from a diet, at least when they base it on past experience, is a burst of success, then eventual failure when the weight returns. They just don’t want to think about that right now. When people want something that truly and deeply matters to them the last thing they want to do is consider the consequences in advance.
LA and San Francisco would be villages today if people thought and acted on the eventual consequences of an earthquake. That’s because it stands in the way of their wants and desires.
Consequences are never pleasant to think about, unless we are prepared to act. With each diet, we cause a little more damage to our metabolism and we ensure that more weight will follow with each one. We have also learned that that the next diet will always be harder to go through than the one before.
A diet can be two things.
1. A medical requirement which must be adhered to. Such diets vary but they have things in common, they are almost always permanent and require that you avoid or select specific foods. In other words, they represent a permanent change in lifestyle which, if not adhered to, will cause a risk to health, even a threat to life. Even under those circumstances some people refuse to act against their wants and desires because they are driven by a strong yearning for the banned foods which they cannot resist.
2. The other type of diet has just one purpose, it promises to lose weight, as quickly and painlessly as possible. This appeals to people because it is precisely what they want to hear and to believe. There have been hundreds such diets in the past and we can expect even more in the future because they promise exactly what we hope for. So instead of dwelling on how the diet will affect us in the future, we decide to trust the promise and settle for an inevitable short term result even when the cost of that can be very high. We are only human right?
Stop to think for a moment, about all those diets that have gone before. Think how they can ignite your wants and desires and cause you to believe things you know will prove false, eventually. Look at it realistically; if just one single diet out of all those hundreds of diets finally proves to work, then that would become the winning diet and nobody would want or need any other.
The one thing we can all guarantee about diets is that if that perfect diet, the one that actually works, ever comes to along, it will be news around the world within 48 hours. That means you do not have to jump on the next bandwagon. You can sit back and let someone else experiment with futility. You see, in the final analysis, we all know, deep down that diets do not work…Ever! They cannot, because they fly in the face of nature.
Your only chance for a permanent, healthy way to lose weight is to not diet at all. To lose weight permanently you need to do only four things:
1. Learn how to adapt your lifestyle to foods your body was designed to eat.

2. Learn how to jumpstart your sluggish metabolism and let your body control your weight as nature intended it to do.

3. Learn how to get back your energy and have a slim body again

4. Learn how to keep your slim body and never have to put the weight back on again.

So what do you expect from a diet? Think about it; are these four goals not the ultimate want and desire of everyone? Remember; to achieve them you do not need to count your calories.
These are not difficult things to do. If you can sustain a diet of low calories for 6 weeks, as I’m sure you have done in the past. Then you can sustain a selective food plan, which lets you eat an unrestricted amount of food for the same period. If you do, you will find that within a few weeks, not only will your weight be reduced you will discover that you no longer experience food cravings.
This is a lifestyle anyone can live with. It means; being slim permanently, not ever feeling hungry and not ever having cravings for the foods you know you should not eat.

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Kirsten Plotkin author
Goldcoast, Australia