95% of dieters regain the weight because the brain's survival instincts kick in when calories drop, triggering fatigue, cravings, and obsessive food thoughts. Willpower exhausts like a muscle. Weight loss works when you stop moralizing food and see it as fuel instead.
And yes, we all know you lose weight on diets, but it's short-lived, and then you start blaming yourself for having no willpower. But it's not your fault! 95% of people on diets don't lose weight long term. This is because it's really, really hard to change ingrained eating habits, and your brain works against you when you're dieting or depriving yourself of food. If the body feels it's being starved, it thinks you're going to die, so it goes into protection mode to keep you alive. Have you ever felt tired when you're restricting food and calories? I bet you have. You see, your mind and body communicate and decide you must conserve energy, so they make you feel tired all the time, making sugary snacks and carbs irresistible and the go-to source of energy. That's when your willpower is really being tested. But the trouble is, willpower is like a muscle. The more you use it, the more tired it gets. This is why it's almost impossible to continually rely on willpower to eat healthily. It's not your fault, it's just not humanly possible to do it. The other thing about trying to lose weight by consciously restricting the food you enjoy is when you get those annoying cravings. Your brain conspires against you and you find you just can't get the cakes and snacks off your mind. You become obsessed with what you can't have. Food consumes every waking thought. Every calorie becomes a major worry. This is because the brain brings to mind more of what's on your mind. I'll give you a great example of this. When you want to buy a new car and you think that you'd like a red one, every second car you see seems to be red. The same happens with food. Diets force food to the front of your mind because you're weighing it, you're counting calories, Syns, or any other number of things. But food should be the last thing on your mind if you want to lose weight, shouldn't it? It's common sense. Diets also change your psychological relationship with food. It becomes good or bad, naughty or a treat. Food should have no meaning whatsoever apart from being needed as nutrition to fuel your body. So this is how your brain works against diets and not with them.
