For something that we say that we hate, we sure do a lot of dieting. More than half of all Americans say that they’re actively trying to lose weight, and millions of us are trying to do so by cutting calories or going on special diets. The idea, of course, is that our willpower and special diets will force our bodies to shed the pounds — at which point we will get off the diet and onto something more sustainable that, we hope, will help us keep the weight off.
The problem is: None of this stuff works!
Diets overwhelmingly fail. That’s partly because people don’t stick to them, and partly because dieting itself is a flawed idea. Weight loss is much more complicated than fad diets make it seem. Furthermore, health is more than how much you weigh. Even if you do crash-diet your way to your goal weight, study after study has shown that you’re very likely to regain all of that weight soon after you reach the goal.
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