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Dieting to Lose Weight - Why it fails?

Very few diets are complete. To be complete, a diet must have balanced nutrition in addition to restricted calories as the bottom line for safe weight loss. To be complete, a diet should fall within these guidelines:

• 1/3 of your diet should be vegetables and fruits
• 1/3 of your diet should be grain products
• 1/6 of your diet should be milk or dairy products
• 1/6 of your diet should be meats and poultry

The variety insures that you receive adequate nutrition, while keeping your fats low, your fiber up and your protein balanced. But even then, it's no guarantee that you'll keep your weight off when you reach your ideal body weight.

Dieting Alone & Weight Loss

A "diet" is simply a form of cutting calories. Assuming you select a good diet, your calories are cut across the board to keep your daily food intake balanced at a lower calorie level. The problem is, when you cut your intake of calories, over a period of time, your body adjusts to the lower calorie level, and you can find yourself at ideal weight unable to eat more calories without gaining weight. In other words, your body burns less calories in order to preserve its nutrients.

When you reach ideal weight, you need a "re-entry" phase to gradually train your body to accept more calories without gaining weight. This is the function of "maintenance". Dieting without a maintenance plan is asking for weight regain.

Most people who eat compulsively and weigh too much focus only on losing weight, not on weight "maintenance". They rarely want to confront the hard fact that dieting alone won't give them the long-term weight loss results. They loss weight with a diet, and think they're safe because they're thinner, but they may not have changed the eating habits that led to their original weight problem. Old habits creep in, and soon, the weight returns. The job of behavior modification is to retrain the dieter to change bad habits into good ones, during the course of weight loss. In that way, you reach your goal weight with the skills you need to eat smart for life. You control your food and moods, instead of them controlling you.