The Top Five Reasons Diets Fail

The hunger was debilitating. I’d been on the diet for three days now, my mind was a haze. I just wanted to eat chinese take-away food. I couldn’t stop thinking about spring rolls! This process wasn’t just punishing, it was ridiculous! “How on earth am I expected to live like this?” I said to myself. Reconfirming to myself that my mind was in a thick, hunger-induced smog. It was only my third day on a protein-shake diet, and I was cracking.

In the hour that followed, I consumed one bag of chips, one stir-fried Noodles, one large portion of sweet and sour chicken, and no fewer than ten large spring rolls. Oh, I also followed that with a whole tub of cookie-dough ice cream. This was a cumulative total of around 3000 calories. It was a sorry end to my experiment with a ‘protein-shake only’ diet.

I should of known better. I was young and naive, and had only been reading about nutrition for a few months. I’d made good progress and lost some fat. I was actually starting to see some real progress in the gym. Then I found an easy route, or so I thought at the time. I’d read the article, it seemed too good to be true. ’Drop up to 15lbs of fat in a week!’, I thought this was exactly what I needed. This diet would get me not just to my target weight, but below it. I’d be freekin’ ripped, I thought.

The next day I reverted back to my usual diet, the one that had given me steady progress. It was far more manageable, and I wasn’t hungry all the time, unlike on the protein shake diet. In the next few days I seemed to ‘balloon’ in front of my own eyes. How could a diet that was previously working well for me now be making me fat?

In the years that followed, I studied the science behind nutrition. I read pretty much all the popular diet plans out there, I read a bunch of the not so popular ones too, I read nutrition journals, science journals, I experimented. I figured out what worked for me. In my mind, it’s important that you experiment with different nutrition systems. Find a moderation – find what works for you. It’s diets like the ‘protein shake only’ diet, that result in wild binges and excess weight gain when you return to eating something like a ‘normal diet’. You’re also severely limiting food groups with many fad diets, which in the long term is at best unsustainable, and at worst downright dangerous.

It’s possible to eat right long-term, and it’s also possible to enjoy eating this way. It just requires realistic goal-setting and a sensible nutrition plan. This means you do get cheat days, holiday periods in which you just eat whatever the hell you like, and up to month-long hiatuses from the gym. I live this way now. When I need to tweak things slightly, maybe to look extra ‘rippped’ in the summer, I do so accordingly. I currently weigh around 184lbs at 6ft, I’m also under 12% body-fat year round.

With the above in mind, and based upon things I’ve seen people do countless times…I present to you the Food4Abs top 5 ways to fail on a diet:

1. You don’t track anything. You think you only swayed from your nutrition plan ‘a few times’ this week, then you had that cheat day, and you still haven’t lost weight! What went wrong?

When we keep a food journal, and actually update it with everything we eat and drink, we can see how far from our original plan we were. You might discover that you didn’t really deserve that cheat day on saturday after cheating all week.

2. You’re being too strict, too soon. Perhaps the opposite of #1, you’re cutting too many calories, you’ve cut out all that coffee and soda you drank religiously for years, and you’ve taken up a new 2 hour per-day exercise regime.

It can be very hard to go ‘cold turkey’ on a lifetime of bad habits. Sometimes it’s okay to ease yourself into a new healthy lifestyle, opposed to jumping in at the deep-end when you don’t know how to swim.

3. You don’t have enough energy to do the things you need to do.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories to operate and keep itself from‘starvation mode’. This isn’t what we’re aiming for with any diet. When it comes to cutting calories it’s far better to make reduction a gradual process, sometimes we need patience to get results.

4.  You’ve changed the diet, not the lifestyle.

If you think eating well is a chore, healthy food is horrible, and going to the gym is a waste of time you’re probably not going to succeed. It’s important to do the things you enjoy, but for weight loss to be permanent, you have to stop viewing ‘diets’ as a short-term fix. People with this attitude often swing wildly between super-strict fad diets, and crazy binges.

5. You don’t set yourself any goals.

You know you want to lose weight but its not target specific. How much weight do you want to lose? When do you want to lose it by? What’s the next step after you’ve lost this weight? What do you have to gain from losing weight? Set yourself tough, but realistic goals. Don’t have one goal, but a series of smaller goals you can reach for. This will illustrate for you the progress you’ve made. It’s also a great way to increase motivation as you’ll have a series of  ‘mini-victories’.

I hope this helps you overcome some of your dieting mistakes. Best of luck with all your nutrition and physique goals.