I don't know how many diets you’ve been through, but like anything in life, if you don't have the right mindset, chances are you won’t succeed.
In fact, if you're like most people, your experience with diets probably goes something like this:
First, you’re excited and follow the directions closely. Usually, by restricting calories and starving yourself of much needed nutrients. You exercise more because you’re told that burning excess calories burns fat.
After a few days, you begin weighing yourself. Whether you've lost actual fat or not doesn’t matter. You’re feeling great and your weight is down. Yippee!
Yup! Ever heard of intermittment fasting. Check out our article about it. Fasting does make you feel good and more energized. But only in the short-term. You didn't know that... so, you continue with greater enthusiasm than before.
Without knowing it, your desire for weight-loss overrides the needs of your body. You keep forcing the diet as you want to do even better. So you compromise your body even more… heck if you haven’t already (congrats BTW), you may even break your diet with something sweet and sugary as the cravings get more strong.
Again you weight yourself. You are still losing weight. Whoohoo! It’s been over a week of starvation and calorie restriction now. You look in the mirror and convince yourself that you are getting truly thinner.
The shrinking of the stomach, loss of muscle-mass, and dehydration could be the winners here… it is unlikely it is due to a lot of actual fat loss.
So far so good, right?
You keep this up a few days more, or even a few weeks more, but sooner or later, your motivation starts to dwindle.
You may even begin to feel burnt out, hungry, irritable, or have insatiable cravings for foods that are high in sugars or carbs. That is if you lasted this long without breaking your diet too many times for measure any legitimate success.
Next things go from bad to worse.
As time goes on, you loosen your diet as you weren’t feeling that great, and you probably aren’t looking that great either. Your skin tone has lost some color and vibrance, the weight that you lost may have started coming back, and you may even start to look bloated.
If you’re resilient, you may start the whole cycle again and be even more disciplined with your calories and exercise routine, but if you don’t crash, then you’ll break your diet again because your body is in survival mode and your mind can’t overide its will to live.
To add insult to injury, your body may even start to store more fat to survive the next round of starvation. Even with supplementation this cycle is unhealthy, dangerous, and leads to bulimia and other eating disorders.
Isn’t the whole point of going on a diet to be healthier? To look and feel better. The weight will follow… on its own… and all you need to do is make different food choices. That is it... with or without exercise... with or without calorie counting.
Sadly, most diets are gateways, to additional weight gain... talk about frustrating. Not only that, even if you do lose weight, it could be water or muscular weight and it may not even reduce the fat inside your organs and body. This is why seemingly lean athletes can die of a fatty liver or even heart attack... assuming they are drug-free of course.
The reason why people go through this familiar and tragic pattern is because they don't have the right mindset and framing.
It really doesn't matter whether you’re trying to adopt the Keto diet, the Paleo diet, the Atkins diet, Ornish, or any other program… without the right mindset and framing you’re playing to lose.