Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of ads online for weight loss supplements that all make essentially the same claim – the diet industry sets its customers up for failure on purpose. While this is an ironic statement coming from companies hawking their own miracle diet solutions, I’ve been wondering if there’s any truth to it.

The main argument is that if those diet pills actually worked, then the companies that make them would lose all the customers they need to stay in business. The truth is that people often do lose weight on these products, but then gain it all back, and then some. A recent review of dozens of scientific studies on dieting (American Psychologist – April 2007) concludes that, “there is little support for the notion that diets lead to lasting weight loss or heath benefits.” It goes on to state that as many as 83% of dieters will actually weigh more than their pre-diet weight two years after they started their diet program. But who’s to blame for this massive failure – the customer or the companies?

While we as consumers theoretically have free choice, diet supplement advertisers prey on our ignorance, hopes and insecurities to get us to buy their pills. They often market their products using studies of questionable objectivity, and have resorted to setting up fake blogs devoted to hawking their products. Who hasn’t seen blogs or websites telling us about ‘Jessica’s (or Jane’s or Debbie’s or Jason’s) Real Story – How I lost 500 lbs using this simple weird trick!’ And the weird trick turns out to be some exotic berry growing on the underside of a jungle fungus harvested by pygmies. Yours for only $139.97 each month!

We want to be like Jessica. We identify with the images of her as an overweight person and we want desperately to achieve the same results as she did.  We want a slim healthy fit body.  But is it realistic? When a company promises us unbelievable results we do know better, but we can’t help ourselves because really, just taking a pill would be sooo much easier than actually having to make any lifestyle changes. As consumers, our lack of critical thinking is just as much to blame as the diet industry’s unscrupulous marketing tactics.

But enough blame: How can we make our weight loss plans truly successful, and keep the weight off for good? The fact of the matter is, people fail on diets because they take a pill or make a temporary, unsustainable change to their eating habits, and once they’ve lost a bit of weight, revert back to their old habits. Presto, the pounds fly back on and it’s back to square one. Unless you address the underlying cause(s) of your overeating and make true changes to your lifestyle, you are just setting yourself up for failure.

How do we identify the causes and find solutions? Emotional eating has gotten a lot of media attention as of late, frequently discussed on shows like the Biggest Loser and Joy Behar, but it’s only one factor that affects our overeating.

Here’s a simple exercise you can do to analyze why you eat, along with practical and unusual solutions to modify your eating habits for good.

References:

http://mann.bol.ucla.edu/files/Diets_don’t_work.pdf

Copyright 2010 Living-Well.net