Hey guys.
In this article you’re going to learn why diets suck…
Now the word “diet” has 2 meaning: it can mean the food that you regularly eat, “your diet,” like a panda eats a diet of bamboo leaves, or it can mean “going on a diet.” And when I use the word here that’s what I mean: GOING on a diet to lose weight.
I don’t have to by a psychic to guess that you’ve probably tried to diet before, and it didn’t work. Either you didn’t lose weight, or you did, and then you regained it. I can say this very confidently because the statistics are…overwhelming. The vast majority of people who go on a diet don’t lose any weight. And of that minority who DO lose weight, the vast majority of THEM will regain all of it—and often even more—in a relatively short amount of time.
Here’s just a quick overview of the case against diets:
- 35.7%. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 35.7% of Americans are obese. (Not overweight…obese.) That’s about 250 million people who would love to change their bodies. What happens when they try to change their bodies?
(Source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db82.pdf) - 95%. According to a document from the University of Colorado-Boulder, 95% of diet attempts fail. In other words, 19 out of every 20 people who go on a diet will either fail to lose any weight at all…or they’ll gain back all the weight they lose within 2-3 years. But it gets worse…
(Source: http://www.colorado.edu/geography/class_homepages/geog_4742_f10/Powerpts/obesity.pdf) - 83%. According to researchers at UCLA, 83% of dieters not only gain back all the weight they lost…within 2 years they actually gain back MORE weight than they had in the first place. Five years later, more than half had gained an extra 11 pounds.
(Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/dieting-does-not-work-ucla-researchers-7832.aspx) - 97%. In another study published by the International Journal of Obesity, 97% of people who lose weight regained it within a few short years.
(Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2663745) - 99.5% Arthur frank medical director of George Washington University weight management program reports: Out of 200 people who diet, only 10 lose weight, and only 1 keeps it off. That’s a failure rate of 99.5%.
I could go on—there are MANY studies like this—but you get the idea. They just don’t work. Sorry, if you love diets, but the fact is, they’re worse than bad…worse than ineffective…they’re HOPELESS.
Now Here’s The Good News
First of all, it means that you’re not alone. You’re not alone, and there’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t have a slow metabolism, you aren’t addicted to sugar, you probably don’t have a weird hormonal issue causing your weight gain.
The truth is, you didn’t fail at your diet…
Your diet failed you.
Dieting is like going into a garden and trimming the weeds. First of all, it’s hard work. And it will work…sort of. It will make your garden look weed-free. For a while.
But the weeds are still there, under the surface. And their roots are still choking the life out of your garden. The only way to really solve the problem is to pull those bastards out by the roots.
A UCLA researcher and professor named Traci Mann did a study on the long-term effects of diets, and what did he have to say?
Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people.
—Traci Mann, UCLA Associate Professor of Psychology
That sounds pretty bad. But it actually gets worse. Because when you look at the data, it appears that diets actually lead to weight GAIN…consistently. For almost everybody.
Another UCLA researcher working with Traci Mann said: “Several studies indicate that dieting is actually a consistent predictor of future weight gain.”
You’re probably wondering…WTF? How can a diet that’s meant to help you LOSE weight actually make you GAIN it?
It seems counterintuitive, but multiple studies show that diets actually make us eat MORE. That might sound crazy, but it’s true, and it’s verified in multiple published studies.
A 1999 study by Janet Polivy and Peter Herman found that dieters were more likely to overindulge than non-dieters. The reason is because when dieters “go off their diet,” they go WAY off their diet and binge.
The reason why? Because it leads to obsessing about food, binge eating, and emotional suffering.
People who diet become “anxious, apathetic, and withdrawn” and “lost ambition and sense of humor,” “decreased concentration and sex drive,” and showed “signs of depression.”
Diets also lead to a cycle where we binge, and then we feel guilty. That makes us try to diet even harder…which makes us even more likely to binge.
That’s the definition of a vicious cycle. And this even happens to people who are not overweight.
An Unethical & Inhumane Diet Study
One study took men who were perfectly well-adjusted and had a normal body weight. They followed the men for several months before the study just to make sure they had no issues around eating. They put them on a 1600 calorie diet. What happened?
The men developed body image issues and started to feel fat. They ended up with emotional hunger binges that were RAVENOUS, even after the study was over.
According to Josie Spinardi and her excellent book “How to Have Your Cake and Your Skinny Jeans Too,” (highly recommended book btw), This study would no longer be allowed because the APA would consider it unethical and inhumane.
Josie has a few more reasons why diets don’t work:
- Diets cause cravings and make you obsess over food because your brain thinks it’s scarce.
- Diets make you less in control of your eating.
- Diets cause stress. By putting your neocortex (thinking brain) in charge of food, it makes every meal a difficult and stressful decision. (One study showed that dieters feel anxiety, stress, and guilt just from LOOKING at a picture of chocolate—and they didn’t even eat any!)
- Diets increase stress-related eating.
- Diets cause you to eat uncontrollably when you “go off your diet.”
- Diets don’t solve the real issue.
On top of that, I’d like to add a few basic, obvious reasons why diets don’t work.
- They’re hard.
- People like to eat.
- Nobody likes to feel hungry.
- You eat all the time. If you eat 3 meals a day, plus 1-2 snacks, let’s call that eating 5 times a day. That’s 35 times a week or 1820 times a year. That means that if you want to lose weight and keep it off for the next 10 years, that’s 18,200 times that you have to say “no thank you” to pizza and have a chicken breast salad instead. That’s a lot of choices. It’s just about impossible to “be good” that consistently.
And Yet…Weight Loss Is Possible
Even though diets don’t work, it IS possible to lose weight. In fact, not only can you lose weight, you can completely and radically transform your body.
And you know this is true, because you’ve seen it. You’ve read the success stories. You’ve seen the before and after pictures. You’ve seen people on TV lose weight. You probably know someone who lost a lot of weight.
I know it’s possible because…I did it.
And so did my brother. So…how did these people do it? And more importantly, how do YOU do it?
The truth is, as we’ve learned in this video, that nobody can stick to a “diet” forever.
So in order to lose weight and keep it off, the trick is to make your diet stick to you.
And you do that by taking your food decisions out of your neocortex (thinking brain) and put them back where they belong in the habitual part of your brain. First, though, we have to change the habitual part of your brain.
We have to rewire it with healthy habits that help you lose weight and achieve a lean, sexy figure.
This is possible because of something called…
Neuroplasticity For Weight Loss
Neuroplasticity is a fancy word but it means something very simple:
You can change your brain.
As we develop more and more sophisticated brain imaging studies, we’re learning that it’s possible to physically change the way your brain is wired. Your brain has neural pathways—brain circuits—and the stronger a pathway is, the more likely you are to engage in the behavior that pathway leads to. But by creating new neural pathways, that lead to healthier behavior, you’ll become more likely to eat right—and the old neural pathways that led to overeating will fade away over time. Neuroplasticity is important because the truth is, and I believe this in my core: you’ll never achieve lasting weight loss without it. I believe that the people who HAVE lost weight and kept it off did so by changing their brain, whether they knew it or not.
So how do you rewire your brain for permanent weight loss?
Well, that should be pretty simple…
By buying all my courses!
(I’m kidding of course. You definitely don’t have to buy all my courses.)
But here is something really important to keep in mind:
Weight Loss Focusing Illusions
Have you ever heard of a “focusing illusion”? A focusing illusion is when you focus on what you want…and it turns out that you were focusing on the wrong thing.
For example, true story, a football team once signed a quarterback, but they were worried that he threw too many interceptions. So they put a clause in his contract that penalized him for every interception he threw. They thought this would help cut down on his interceptions. What happened? The quarterback stopped throwing the ball altogether. Instead of making a potentially risky throw, he would tuck the ball and run, or take a sack, or throw an incompletion, or run out of bounds—he never took a risk, he only threw passes that were super-safe, and as a result, he was a horrible quarterback. The team focused way too much on the wrong thing: interceptions.
Another example is computer programmers. Some companies pay their programmers by how many lines of code they write. The more lines of code you write, the more money you get. The companies thought this would make their programmers more productive by giving them an incentive to write more code. Instead… What happened was, programmers started writing really long code. They added in extra loops and calls and functions and all sorts of technical programmer stuff. They weren’t being more productive—they were being LESS EFFICIENT. Using more lines of code to accomplish the same thing. And the result of inefficient code is, you get software and programs that are SLOW. These companies focused way too much on the wrong thing: total lines of code.
There are a ton more examples of focusing illusions. The book, “The Myth of the Garage” has a bunch.
People in the midwest who have cold winters tend to think that people in California are happier—but they’re not. The midwesterners are just focusing on the wrong thing, weather.
The reason I bring this up is because weight-loss is FULL of focusing illusions.
And many of these focusing illusions sound sexy and tempting—things like carbs and cardio, raspberry ketones and green coffee extract. But they’re the wrong things to focus on.
The reason the course you’re about to watch is so powerful is because it gives you the RIGHT things to focus on: things like your beliefs, your habits, your goals, your emotions, your social support, and your willpower.
Get excited, because you’ve got a whole lean lifetime ahead of you, and today is the first day of it.