We all know that many people fail on their diets and often wonder why. Well there is a number of factors that affect whether a diet will work or will not. I thought I would pull some info from a KLTV article from today and will paraphrase the details.

About one in three American adults is trying to lose weight at any given time, and while their track record for trying is good, their track record for succeeding is not.

Within five years, most dieters will regain the weight they lost. And, after five years, they may even weigh more than when they started the original weight-loss effort, some studies have found.

But weight-loss researchers have begun to uncover insights into what makes some dieters succeed while others fail. While there are no hard-and-fast rules that work for everyone, there are ways to maximize your success the next time you decide to drop those excess pounds — maybe for good.

A strategy for success begins with getting realistic, experts say.

Unrealistic Goals
“Cause number-one [for failure] is setting too unrealistic of goals, losing too much too fast,” said Barbel Knauper, an associate professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal. Instead of trying to lose, say, 15 pounds in a month — very unrealistic — most experts suggest a slow, steady loss, about one or two pounds a week.

Bad eating planning
Another pitfall, Knauper said, is a lack of advance planning before social situations. “If people were making ‘when, where, how’ plans, they would be more likely to adhere to their goal,” he said. For instance, you might say to yourself, ‘When I go out for dinner tonight with friends, I won’t order a large entree, but a smaller one. And I’ll stick with my choice even if they pressure me to eat more.’”

Socializing is one of the top three reasons people eventually fail with a diet, said Dr. Michael Dansinger, an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center, in Boston.

Feeling deprived of certain foods
The other two? “Feelings of deprivation or boredom with the current eating plan,” Dansinger said, “and the healthy foods often seem to be less available, require more preparation or cost more than the unhealthy foods.”

Portion size and the effect of exercise
Still another pitfall, Knauper said, is that people often underestimate the number of calories in foods and overestimate the number of calories burned through exercise.

In one study, Knauper asked 132 women trying to lose weight on their own to tell him their strategies — their dieting “rules,” so to speak. In all, the 132 dieters offered 895 rules, with each woman listing an average of nearly seven.

Then his research team followed the women to see which rules worked. Overall, adherence to the self-set rules was low. But the ones deemed most effective were the simplest — reducing calories and increasing exercise. Other rules that worked included: decreasing sugar intake; increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables, vitamins and water; watching less TV; and eating at home more often.

If you’ve tried unsuccessfully to diet many times, Dansinger suggests getting a “coach.” A coach can be your doctor, another health professional, or a friend who’ll hold you accountable to your goals, he said. He also suggests recording your intake of calories every day, limiting calories, and exercising seven hours a week, including cardiovascular and weight workouts.

In a 2005 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dansinger also found that adherence to a weight-loss plan — any plan — is more important than the diet regimen itself. He compared people on Weight Watchers, Atkins, Zone and Ornish diets and found no substantial weight-loss differences at one year, regardless of the diet. The amount of weight lost ranged from 4.6 to 7.3 pounds.

So what can we learn from this study? Well I believe that it is most important to look sometimes at your weight loss plan as a bit of a high wire act where you always need to be loose and able to move one way or another but at the same time focused on whee you are and where you are going. Although most diets fail there is no way to fail if you change your lifestyle and attitude about food and exercise.

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

Tags: American Medical Association, associate professor, associate professor of psychology, Barbel Knauper, Boston, coach, Dansinger, food, KLTV, McGill University in Montreal, Michael Dansinger, Montreal, professor of medicine, professor of psychology, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Tufts-New England Medical Center

This study below that I gleaned from the LA Times shows that just altering your diet may not be able to undo a life of bad eating. Maybe if they included exercise in these peoples lives it may have made a bigger difference to their health.

Overturning three decades of conventional wisdom, a new study of low-fat diets in nearly 50,000 healthy older women has shown that reducing fat intake alone does not significantly reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, breast cancer or colorectal cancer, researchers reported today. Results from the same study reported last month also showed that reducing fats without reducing calories does not lead to significant weight loss.

“Just switching to low-fat foods is not likely to yield much health benefit in most women,” said Marcia Stefanick, a professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, chairwoman of the steering committee for the Women’s Health Initiative study.

“Rather than trying to eat ‘low-fat,’ women should focus on reducing saturated fats and trans fats,” the so-called bad fats, while maintaining their intake of “good” fats, such as vegetable, olive and fish oils.
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Tags: American Medical Assn, atkins diet, biostatistician, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, chairwoman, colorectal cancer, diabetes, director, Elizabeth G. Nabel, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, heart disease, high energy density, LA Times, Los Angeles Biomedical Institute, low fat diet, low fat diets, Lung and Blood Institute, Mara Vitolins, Marcia Stefanick, National Heart, North Carolina, professor of medicine, professor of public health sciences, Ross Prentice, Rowan T. Chlebowski, Seattle, Stanford Prevention Research Center, stroke, study co-author, the LA Times, USD, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Winston-Salem

A couple years ago my wife was considering weight loss surgery as her years off dieting and exercise and the yoyo weight loss/gain nightmare had mad her tired of the whole weight loss industry. Using Weight Watchers and getting the exercise to a more moderate lvel have helped Michelle lose three pounds or so per week and she is quickly dropping the weight that was so stubborn just a couple of years back. Yesterday Michelle got a call for the gastric bypass surgery consultation which here in Alberta Canada takes 19 months, I am happy to say that she turned it down because a healthy lifestyle has maed the difference for her. As you probably know there are a lot of instances where this surgery is really helpful for people but only in cases where there is a risk of imminent death by now doing something as drastic as this surgery is.

I have found an article from Bloomberg that I think really shows the importance of this surgery and the possible implications. Below are some exerpts from that article.
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Tags: American Medical Association, arthritis, associate professor, back surgery, bariatric surgeries, bariatric surgery, Bloomberg, Bruce M. Wolfe, California, David R. Flum, David S. Zingmond, diabetes, food, Gastric bypass, gastric bypass surgery, GBP, health care services, heart surgery, high blood pressure, hip replacement, insurance, John M. Morton, Journal of the American Medical Association, knee surgery, lead researcher, Los Angeles, Medicare, Michelle Fay Cortez, Minneapolis, obesity, obesity surgery, Oregon Health Science University in Portland, plastic surgery, Portland, professor of medicine, professor of surgery, reporter, Seattle, Stanford University in California, surgeries, surgery, UCLA's School of Medicine, United States, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Washington in Seattle, weight loss surgery

Another Really good Reason to be aware of your surroundings and to keep yourself in shape. This article from the associated press show how people are creatures of habit but I have seen so many times that if you really want to change than you have it in your grasp to do so.

Just when we thought we couldn’t get any fatter, a new study that followed Americans for three decades suggests that over the long haul, 9 out of 10 men and 7 out of 10 women will become overweight.

Even if you are one of the lucky few who made it to middle age without getting fat, don’t congratulate yourself _ keep watching that waistline.

Half of the men and women in the study who had made it well into adulthood without a weight problem ultimately became overweight. A third of those women and a quarter of the men became obese.

“You cannot become complacent, because you are at risk of becoming overweight,” said Ramachandran Vasan, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University and the study’s lead author.

He and other researchers studied data gathered from 4,000 white adults over 30 years. Participants were between the ages of 30 and 59 at the start, and were examined every four years. By the end of the study, more than 1 in 3 had become obese.
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Tags: and Blood Institute, arthritis, associate professor, associate professor of medicine, Boston University, cancers, diabetes, director, Elizabeth G. Nabel, food, heart disease, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, lead author, Lung, Mark Vander Weg, Massachusetts, Mayo Clinic, National Heart, obesity, obesity researcher, professor of medicine, professor of medicine and an obesity researcher, psychologist, Ramachandran Vasan, Susan Bartlett, the Annals of Internal Medicine, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States