The Best Weight Loss Diet: How to end the dieting cycle for good

The best weight loss diet is a combination of making permanent change for life, and changing our behaviours around food. The hunt for weight loss diets that perpetuate the dieting cycle continue to consume people in their desperate search for a solution to weight management.

Weight management starts with the internal belief that you are a thin, healthy person, and, from there, you can adopt lifestyle behaviours that fit with who you really are. I've heard so many overweight people say that they're a thin person on the inside. "This fat person is not who I am," they say. So how do we take that conscious belief and make it a reality? We begin on the inside where our behaviours around food originate.  This is our control centre, where our current eating habits lie.

Becoming Conscious: Why are we overweight?

How can we possibly find a solution for change until we know how we got where we are, until we understand the behaviours that continue to drive us to overeat and crave the wrong foods? I believe there are two primary influences (outside of psychological convictions) that have contributed to our society of overweight over-eaters:

1. The reward centre in our brains is overloaded with the proliferation of high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, processed foods. We're so far gone (physically addicted) when it comes to gaining control over our chemical drives around processed food that these bad, obsessive behaviours are ingrained. So, we're forced--over and over--into desperate, dieting techniques that merely add to our demise.
   
   These behaviours will not go away until we consciously change. So, unless your new weight loss diet begins with the foundation of permanent change, you'll, inevitably, go back to your old ways. Eventually the weight will come back, and you'll begin the cycle again.

1. We eat too much.
   One reason we eat too much is that we simply can't stop for the reasons I've stated above: we're addicted. Secondly, because portions sizes and portion control are out of whack, we've become completely out of touch with our bodies. We no longer know what it feels like to be hungry; to feed our bodies simply because they need and are asking for nourishment.
   
   We clean our plates no matter how much food is put on them. Unfortunately, super-size has become the norm. And, we eat as though we can't get more, forgetting that there is an abundance, and we'll eat again in four or six hours. We forget that any excess will get stored as fat and that we'll work twice as hard to get it off than to have pushed ourselves away from the table.

What we need is an attitude adjustment

Dieting is dieting. It's deprivation and starvation. No wonder it takes so much will power and strength to begin a "diet" on Monday morning. It's horrible! And no way to live. 

My question to you is this: When you start that diet, do you think about what will happen after it's finished? When you've lost the weight, how will you eat? What will you eat? How will you deal with grocery shopping and temptation and celebration? How will you react when bad food is available to you? How will you choose what to do?

I can answer all of those questions for you. The only behaviour you know is what got you in this mess in the first place. The overeating, poor decisions, and bad reactions to situations will not change unless you change them.

Dieting is not a long-term, permanent solution.

Dieting doesn't create new, positive behaviours around food. It doesn't teach you how to say no and feel good about it. It doesn't teach you how to enjoy a treat now and then and get right back to healthy eating--not dieting--the next day.

Dieting only makes you want food more because you've suffered and deprived your body of what it needs to be healthy. The only successful weight loss plan is the one that embraces whole, healthy, unprocessed foods as a permanent way of life. A plan that changes core beliefs about food and teaches us how we can enjoy food as the beautiful, nourishing part of life that it is.