Why Diets Never Work and How To ACTUALLY Lose Weight

Are we all really just a bunch of lazy gluttons?

We are told to eat less, eat everything in moderation, and workout more. If it’s that simple, why are so many of us still struggling with our weight?

70% of Americans are overweight. Are we really willing to believe that 70% of us simply have no willpower and are a bunch of lazy gluttons? Or is there something wrong with the way “diets” are working for us?

In general, diets don’t work because we are much more complex beings than diet culture wants us to believe. Food, for humans, does not work on a calories-in/calories-out model, and no amount of willpower can overcome our deeply-rooted drive for sugar and comfort.

We’re all in the same boat–and it’s sinking

We’ve all learned the socially acceptable ways to talk about diet that don’t sound like we’re whining or feeling sorry for ourselves—but if you keep an ear out, you’ll realize that you are not alone—people are thinking about their weight and their relationship with food constantly.

These are people who have conquered enormous feats in their lives! Single moms, CEOs of companies, caretakers, college graduates…people who have demonstrated commitment and discipline in many other areas of life. But these same people just can’t master eating in moderation and sticking to a workout routine? Doubtful.

Eating, arguably the most natural thing that we are inclined to do every day, has somehow become a massively stressful and counterintuitive burden on many of us. Other animals don’t have this problem—we don’t see horses agonizing over whether or not they should have that extra carrot. We don’t see obese monkeys. So obviously something has gotten in the way of our ability to intuit what, how much and when to eat.

Food is not the enemy–but real food is nowhere to be found

The biggest “something” to speak of? A trillion dollar food industry whose interests are in making money—not in your weight, health, or wellbeing.

Our giant, genius human brains have been able to reinvent “food” so that it barely resembles the original stuff that comes from the earth naturally. This stuff is so perfectly engineered that it is actually addictive—in exactly the same way that other things (gambling, drugs, etc) are addictive. In fact, refined sugar is proven to be EIGHT times more addictive than cocaine. Rats, when given the choice between sugar and cocaine will choose the sugar every single time (almost) without fail.

With this in mind, it is a wonder that any of us aren’t overweight. We were all exposed to a highly addictive drug against our will and without our knowledge when we were way too young to have given consent, and now we’re still paying the price.

Just like with any addiction, every time we get a little “hit,” our bodies and brains start screaming out for more. And not in a cute-baby kind of way—in a big, scary, monster-in-the-closet kind of way.

As you can imagine, constantly craving sugar and helplessly yielding to the craving more times than not would contribute to quite a lot of weight gain.

And yet, that’s still only half the story.

Your body on sugar

The other half is the way that foods with a high-glycemic index (aka most processed foods which cause a huge spike in blood sugar) interact with your body once they’re inside.

I don’t want to bore you with the details, but the gist is this: the chemistry of these foods interact with the chemistry in your body in such a way that certain hormones are released and interpreted differently than they should be. This leaves you A. always feeling hungry, B. unable to tell when you’re full, C. converting calories to fat at a much higher rate than you should be, and D. generally feeling more down—likely leading to even more unhealthy eating in an attempt to soothe yourself.

This food addiction that has been forced upon all of us completely undermines our ability to connect with our body’s natural wisdom and understand how to nourish ourselves properly.

That’s why we can feel so out of control and helpless when it comes to food and we start looking to outside sources to tell us what we’re doing wrong and what we should do differently.

Diets are futile in the face of addiction

With all of this working against us, it’s no wonder that we all keep “failing” every diet we ever try. We’re made to believe we just lack willpower. But in reality, we live in a world that has made it virtually impossible to maintain a healthy weight and eat intuitively without first making an intentional choice to break out of our food addictions and then let go of the belief that we need to “ask the experts” for advice on how to take care of our own bodies.

The answers are all right there inside of you—that’s how we were designed. (Click here to read more about your intuitive ability to heal.) They’re just hard to hear right now over all of the chaos and confusion of the unhealthy food you’ve been eating and bad advice you’ve been getting.

I know that so far I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture of what we’re up against. I promise to come back around to the “what can we do about it?!” part. And I promise that when we get there, you’ll breathe a sigh of relief about how simple it is. But first, I think it’s really important to understand where we’re starting from and how we got here before we start trying to make any adjustments!

With that being said, let’s look at what we’ve been *told* to do to keep our weight under control and why it just doesn’t seem to be working.

Calories-in vs calories-out model is made for machines

Calories are just small units of energy that our bodies use to do everything bodies do. So it makes then to believe that if you eat fewer calories than your body needs, it will have to find the energy elsewhere (fat cells) to make up the difference.

This is the weight-management understanding that has been ubiquitously hammered into our brains. So if we all *get* it, shouldn’t more of us be reaping the benefits of putting this into practice?

The problem is that this is an extremely distilled version of the truth because we are not perfect systems that exist in a sterile, controlled lab. The fact is, calorie for calorie, different foods interact with our bodies in extremely different ways. Think about eating 500 calories worth of gummy bears versus 500 calories worth of broccoli. You would feel very different after each of those indulgences, right?

Well feeling different is your indication that things are different inside of your body! Like I mentioned earlier, the chemistry of food immediately starts interacting with the chemistry of your body once it’s inside.

Your body has the ability to breathe on its own, make you start sweating to regulate body temp, feel hundreds if not thousands of nuanced emotions…in short, it’s incredibly powerful. So the messages that it receives and interprets all day are immensely important—they are what allow your body to maintain normalcy in this chaotic environment called life.

Foods that are highly processed and full of sugar carry messages with them that tell your body to store fat, eat more, and don’t expend too much energy.

Natural foods that provide a balance of macro- and micro- nutrients tell your body that it’s okay to let go of stored fat, it’s okay to expend more energy, and healthful food is readily available whenever it’s needed so no need to binge or obsess.  

This is why people say “you can’t out-exercise a bad diet.” Personally, I think it’s an annoying thing to say, but there is some truth to it.

If you are running two miles on the treadmill in an attempt to burn the 200 calories of ice cream you ate, you’re fighting an uphill battle. You’re still going to be craving more sugar for the rest of the day because that is the request the ice cream triggered in your body with its unique chemical messaging. Plus, if you hate running and you’re forcing yourself to do it because you feel like you *have* to, you’re going to be grumpy. And grumpy people eat less nutritious food. And so the cycle continues.

Make peace with food: Part one

So if we are battling an addiction we didn’t even know we had and everything we thought we knew about losing weight and getting healthy doesn’t work, what CAN we do?!

*Breath* It’s actually really simple.

Doesn’t it intuitively make sense that the truest form of health would come from the simplest solution? Not some man-made diet pill, restrictive diet made up of random amounts of foods someone else chooses for you, or a workout routine that makes you miserable and resentful of your body? Doesn’t it feel good and peaceful to believe that you can heal yourself just by returning to the natural state of health you were born with? Well you can.

The first thing we have to do to reclaim our health is to draw a line in the sand between what is FOOD, and what is a toxic food-lookalike. In other words, we have to stop eating fast food, processed food, chemically engineered food, and food that is really just sugar.

Why? Because it’s not really food. And you literally ARE what you eat.

Your body is constantly rebuilding itself. Did you know your skin completely replaces itself every two to four weeks? Even your skeleton is made of entirely new cells every ten years. And where does your body get the energy from to grow and rebuild itself? From the calories that you eat.

Again, just intuitively, how does it feel to imagine your body is building itself out of greasy hamburgers that are made from sad, sick, caged animals vs out of fresh fruits, vegetables and meat that comes from happy, healthy animals?

Keep Your Eye On The Prize

Switching away from eating processed foods and foods full of sugar can be really hard for the first week or two (the first three days are the hardest). Like I mentioned earlier, our addiction to these foods is a huge part of why dieting feels SO hard.

But the good news is, just like with any addiction, the withdrawals don’t last forever. Armed with this understanding, you can feel safe making the switch this time because you’ll know that you’re not going to have to live with those intense cravings forever! You just have to make it over the hump until your body isn’t obsessing over getting its next fix anymore.

The amazing thing about this process is how quickly it can actually happen! I highly recommend reading Dr. Hyman’s 10 Day Detox Diet to help get yourself through the initial metaphorical weeds. He does an amazing job explaining what is going on in your body during the process and offers tons of helpful advice including recipes for every meal for ten days. But even if you choose not to use that resource, do your research to find food that is fun to cook, is satiating, and tastes delicious—and know that it does get easier.

Another bonus: when you get to the other side of those cravings, you will be amazed at how much better real food tastes! Processed food is SO packed with sugar and fat, that our taste buds adapt to those intense flavors and aren’t as impressed by the natural flavors that come from real food. But this changes really quickly when you cut out those processed foods and you’ll get to enjoy real food in a way you never knew was possible!

­Make peace with food: Part two

Once you have broken your habit of eating addictive foods, you get to be way more lax with yourself about what you do eat and how much.

If you’re eating only foods that are chemically synchronistic with your body, and you’re respecting your body’s cues about when it’s hungry and when it’s full, you’ll be amazed how quickly overeating stops being a problem. You won’t have any rogue hormone spikes awakening that binge-seeking monster in the closet.

Overtime, you will become more and more sensitive to how different foods feel in your body. Like I said earlier, the way you feel is your indication of what’s going on in your body. Once you’ve committed to eating only real, whole foods for a while, your baseline is going to be feeling so much better and healthier. That’s a huge part of what will keep you “on track” long-term—you won’t want to go back to putting things in your body that make you feel tired, achy, depressed etc.

It’s important to think of this return to health as an abundant and joyful practice. This is not about being restrictive or falling into any diet-mindset patterns. This is simple: it’s reclaiming your body’s natural relationship with food and nourishment. The book Intuitive Eating is an incredibly helpful and empowering resource during this process! It offers a ton of anecdotes from the research that made me say, whoa, so it’s not just me.  

­Find movement you enjoy

This is really a two-part process. The first part is allowing yourself to let go of the “have to” mindset of keeping that calories-equation balanced, which has likely been your driver for moving your body in the past. The second part is to be patient but persistent in finding a kind of movement that you genuinely enjoy.

Have you ever stopped to really consider how many ways there are to move your body? There are huge communities of people who spend many hours a week exercising in ways you may have never even heard of! Zumba, krav maga, water aerobics, spin, yoga, hiking, rock climbing, dance, weight lifting, capoeira, cross fit, swimming…the list goes on and on.

Now that we know that calories-in vs calories-out is not actually the end-all be-all equation for weight loss, hopefully this idea of moving just for the sake of moving feels a bit more freeing and exciting to you! The fact is, if it’s an activity you enjoy, you are way more likely to actually do it regularly which is the most important factor for any exercise routine—you know, to do it!

Exercise Helps Keep Your Chemistry In Check (More Efficient Calorie-Usage)

You may be asking yourself, if calories-in vs calories out isn’t the golden ticket, why do I need to move my body at all?

This is a great question.

Just like the real foods we talked about earlier that send chemical messages to your body telling it to work more efficiently, the chemicals released in your body during exercise have a similar message! The hormone regulation that comes from exercise leads to more of the feel-good stuff, less of the feel-bad stuff, and more efficient calorie-usage. All of these things, as if not enough on their own, lead to fewer cravings and binges because the negative emotions that trigger those things will naturally be more under control.

I know that it can feel a little overwhelming to think about trying a new fitness routine—or trying new things in general! For some tips to get started with running, the gym, and other ways of moving your body, check out this library that’s made to help you feel confident dipping your toes into new activities! Remember that everyone has to start somewhere and if you start today, six months from now, you won’t be a beginner anymore.   

You are meant to be healthy and happy

We were not put on this planet to wake up every morning and suffer.

We are allowed to have beautiful, healthy lives! It can take some time to rewire our brains to believe that we can trust our intuition for returning to health, and that’s okay! How many years have you been alive learning the patterns and beliefs you currently have? So if it takes a few months or years to unlearn those things, that is 100% okay.

Just be patient with yourself and know that health is a journey you’ll be on for the rest of your life! But before you know it you’ll be able to look back to this moment, and think, wow, look how far I’ve come.