The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Dieters

I’ve just read yet another article telling me that diets don’t work. This troubles me.

Hundreds of millions of people have the desire to change their body, or change the way they feel about their body every year. And hundreds of millions of people do something about it. Often they do something about it more than once.

So what exactly is it that troubles me?

The false situation of helplessness that this creates

When I read headline after headline telling the world that ‘Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits’ I cringe. I cringe in the same way that I do when I read that ‘detoxing is bad for you’. The same way as when I read that ‘red wine and chocolate are good for you’.

For the majority of us – our health and the way we look and feel about our body occupies our thoughts and goals and ambitions more than most other subjects. And so accordingly, when an article hits our newspaper/magazine/rss feed/website etc with a headline such as ‘Dieting Does Not Work’ we tend to take note and have a look. The ease of information spread in the technological age can be such a damaging thing at times!

So, Ross, You’re Telling Me That Diets DO Work?

No, well not exactly. But let’s have a look at the article.

“You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back,”

We decided to dig up and analyze every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all.

“Several studies indicate that dieting is actually a consistent predictor of future weight gain,”

one of the best predictors of weight gain over the four years was having lost weight on a diet at some point during the years before the study started

This creates a pretty negative and powerless situation. And one which I think does not exist like this.

Now, lets not get carried away here because my message is not that diets ALWAYS DO work but I think that studies and articles such as this are riddled with shortcomings and they actually can do more harm than good. I mean, if I were someone who was looking to change my body and was looking for solutions then this article would leave me feeling rather helpless and wondering where I should turn next.

So what are my concerns with the article?

• There is no definition of what a diet actually is
• There is no consistency (admitted by them) in terms of how the diet was measured and scored
• There is no evidence of how consistent and hardworking/committed the ‘dieters’ were
• There is no mention of a spread of ages, weights, sex, nationality, goals etc
• There is no mention of timeframes consistent across the study
• There is no mention of those who DID succeed and what they did differently
• There is no mention of the quality of the journals/publications that the separate studies were published within
• And on and on…

But – don’t get me wrong. I know that this kind of research is just an amalgamation of other papers (and so some of the points above are inherent to all papers of this type), but nowhere are any of these point alluded to in the article. And given the shortcomings – WHY ARE SUCH DAMNING CLAIMS BEING MADE?

In my opinion some diets do work and some diets don’t. I usually tend to steer clear of the term ‘diet’ when it relates to weight loss or gain due to the negative (and often unhealthy) connotations it has. But in this case I’m sticking with it.

So If Some Diets DO Work – What Makes A Diet Successful?

In my opinion – these are the KEY common factors to successful dieting:

1. Long-termism: most diets become unstuck (and see results found in that study) when they are short-term. Short-term strategies include: making changes that are so dramatic that you know they are unsustainable; dieting for a specific event; simply eating less; not incorporating exercise.
2. Exercise: you simply cannot have a sustainable, long-term successful diet without exercise. If you just eat less calories you will not be able to achieve long-term success. Exercise increases your metabolism and increases the healthy of your organs which gives your body the tools it needs to cleanse and rid your body of fat. In the absence of exercise you will likely just lose water and muscle weight and your body fat will stay the same – and your weight will plateau.
3. Transitioning: nothing is more likely to kill a diet than the cold turkey method. You simply have to build things up slowly. Start with breakfast. Once you have nailed that and you are having a nice healthy breakfast every day with ease, move on to lunch.
4. Allowing ‘vices’: you know you can’t, and you know it’s a slippery slope. So swap your vice for a healthier alternative. If you know that once you open a slab of chocolate you can’t put it down til it is finished then just don’t allow yourself to get into that situation. An alternative is absolutely key though – as with transitioning, if you don’t do things slowly and become too restrictive then you are going to find it extremely tough.
5. Changing Perception of Food: the one thing that kills more diets more often than not is not being able to disassociate the positive feelings we have towards certain foods. This is very closely related to the above point on vices. When we associate such strong pleasurable feelings to certain foods we are always going to be coming from the position of deprivation and restriction. If we change our perception of food to that of FUEL rather than something we do for pleasure then we will start to view things like chocolate a lot more differently. Tony Robbins also suggests asking the question ‘will this cleanse me or clog me’ and I have found that to be incredibly useful.
6. Being kind to yourself: this is one that stops diets in their tracks more than others. So you’ve had a bad day. What do you do? Give up? Thing f*** it, I’m going to the pub? Well DON’T! People who are dieting are often FAR too hard on themselves. If you have a bad day, don’t beat yourself up – just look at what went wrong and put it behind you. One bad day does not undo three weeks hard work. Don’t throw it all away!
7. Setting Goals: I know I sometimes sound like a broken record when it comes to goalsetting, but it is SOOO effective. All you have to do is write them down, make them measurable, set short, medium and long term goals and (write under each one) why they are important, what life will be like if you succeed and what life will be like if you don’t. Now, keep that master goal sheet safe and every morning when you get up and every evening before you go to sleep WRITE OUT YOUR MOST IMPORTANT GOALS. Every day. The power this has is unbelievable. Seriously.

So. Here is hope for you. Of course, not every diet for every person will work. But the world is full of success stories. Just look around the blogosphere. People can do it and people DO do it. And if you follow my seven success traits above then you might just find yourself with the body you dream of quicker than you thought!