Eric Edmeades argues diets fail because they're temporary and rule-heavy, ignoring that diet means a way of life. He explains how dopamine and serotonin drive eating habits, and why one-size approaches like keto ignore our seasonal adaptability. Real change requires addressing multiple hungers beyond nutrition.
Chapters
Don't do it. Don't ever go on a diet again. They don't work. You know what we saw recently, one of the most common searches on Google relative to food, nutrition and diet and weight loss and stuff like that, is why isn't my diet working? Because they don't. And the worst part of it is, is that every time a diet fails, a person takes responsibility for it. Listen to me clearly now and then write this down wherever you can. People don't fail diets. Diets fail, fail people. My guess is that you or somebody you know has at some point lost some weight and then put it back on, or they've lost some weight and put it back on plus a little bit of more, or they've not been able to release the weight, or they went on a diet and it only lasted them for three or four days. You've probably seen all of these and maybe even experienced some of these patterns for yourself. So first of all, let's just start with the word diet, shall we? It's broken. The word diet has been twisted and manipulated to create an incredibly powerful industry. It doesn't mean what we think it means. In fact, here's what we think diet means. We think diet means temporary alteration with some level of restriction and suffering in order to achieve a short term health target or to fit into some special outfit for a special occasion. That's what we think diet means. But if you and I are sitting right now watching the Discovery Channel or National Geographic and the announcer comes on and he goes, oh, look, we have the cheetah. The cheetah's diet consists of 2.5. The cheetah has a diet. The cheetah doesn't go on a diet. In fact, every organism on earth has a diet because diet means way of life. You can't go on a diet. The way you live every day is your diet. And so the key to creating the lasting change that we want to create is changing our diet, not going on one. And by the way, the diet programs out there fail for a number of very obvious reasons. But I'm going to help you to understand this. Here's one of the reasons they fail. Too many rules. Like too many rules. You have a rule, don't eat this anymore for 30 days. And you're like, ooh, I haven't eaten it for four or five days. You know, I've been really good. I could have one. And the minute you give yourself permission, you start to feel good. Now you're producing dopamine and serotonin which are feel good chemicals. Then you eat the food, the feel good chemicals make the food taste even better than it really does, and it all starts all over again. Too many rules will absolutely destroy any diet program. You gotta be really careful about these rules that come on and say, remove all these things. Very often somebody will stumble upon a nutritional reality, a nutritional observation, and they'll see that that situation can create a result. And all of a sudden they believe that is the rule. It has to be that way all the time. And if weight loss is your only goal, well, there you go. But hang on. Weight loss is never the only goal. All of us, especially when we want to lose a little weight, want to lose weight and be healthy. And so what that means is we can't take an approach where there's one nutritional principle. Take a look at the keto diet craze. The keto diet. You should be keto all the time. Keto is the solution. Everything keto. Guess what? There's a lot of truth to that. There's certain healthy things that can happen with ketogenics, but human beings evolved to both survive and utilize seasonal fluctuation. And keto is a season. But now you've got all these people saying, well, no, it works, so it's got to be all the time. What we've examined at WildFit is not simply our diet from a food perspective, but our diet from a lifestyle perspective, understanding seasonal fluctuation. Here's the great news. I've teamed up with mindvalley to create a masterclass for you that talks specifically about why we eat. Yeah. Like, what is it that drives us to eat? Because here's the thing, it's not always nutrition. In fact, I would put to you that it's rarely actually nutrition. Now, in this masterclass, you're going to learn what each of these hungers are and you're going to learn how to neutralize them. It's a very, very powerful masterclass. Register for it right now and I'll see you there. Sam.
