Can You Stop Dieting and Still Lose Weight?

“Diet” may be the dirtiest word in the entire English language. Diet means suffering. It means denial. It means rumbling hunger sensations and sticking out as the weird person not eating what everyone else is passing around.

Each new diet starts out with promise. This time it will be different. I’ll stick to it this time. And we do stick to it. For a day. Maybe a week. If we make it a month or two, we are pretty impressed with ourselves. But then we have a bad day. Stress or exhaustion or boredom drives us to cheat, just a little.

Of course, that little cheat turns into full-blown despair and an eating frenzy that goes on for weeks. How many times have you repeated that cycle? How many times have you tried and failed, despite the very best intentions and a large financial investment in dietary aids or special foods?

The cycle of eating too little and then too much and then too little again takes its toll on our bodies. Doctors agree that yo-yo dieting and gaining and losing weight, again and again, is unhealthy. Continual skips from dieting to overeating and back to dieting again kills the metabolism and just increases our feelings of frustration and failure.

Why is it that, even though we can’t seem to stick to a diet, dieting never ends?

The problem lies in our very psychology. In our minds, a diet is temporary thing. We diet in anticipation of the day we reach our goal and don’t have to diet anymore.

Of course, if we make it that far, we soon find that not dieting anymore leads us right back to where we started. It doesn’t get more depressing than that.

As long as we continue to see dieting as something we start and finish, we will always be overweight. We fail at having the slim, attractive bodies we crave because we treat dieting like a book or a business meeting. A diet can never work if it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The key to lasting weight loss lies in incorporating the habits that lead to weight loss into our lifestyles without planning an end. If you want to be thin, you will always have to be mindful of your eating. The mindfulness does not end the day you see the long-desired numbers on the scale.

One very novel approach to this problem is to rotate new diets on a weekly basis. Each week, enjoy a new and different diet. This combats boredom and allows you to eat what you crave. One week enjoy steaks and cheese on a low carb diet. When you crave sweets, try a week of fruits.

By looking forward to the end of a particular diet each week, you allow yourself to by-pass the urge to stop entirely. Each week brings something new and each diet does end, while your weight loss does not.

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