Are you wasting your time dieting? (Hint: YES YOU ARE)

I was reading a post on http://www.theiflife.com a while ago talking about diet book insanity.

When you think about it, there is pretty much a diet for everything. I mean the last time I typed in "diet" in Amazon the search returns 35,712 results. In short, that is mental!

When I say there is a diet for everything, I truly mean that! - Low carb, no carb, high protein, don't diet diet, warrior diet, paleo diet, soup diets, GI diets, south beach diets, metabolic type dieting, abs diet, zone diet, all day diet. the list goes on and on and on and on.

The problem with the vast majority of diet books is that they're just that - a diet. In essence a diet is simply a specific allowance or selection of food designed to control weight. In most books, this is done by restricted calories for a number of weeks - usually between 12 weeks and 6 months.

As mentioned, the diets in most books work by restricting calories for a number of weeks and once it's completed that's usually it. This has three big drawbacks:

1) Once it's completed, the person will usually go back to their old eating habits and re-gain most of the lost weight - this happens more times than you think

2) The diets work by restricting calories, usually calculated around a persons body weight which isn't a long term healthy option as you can't continually restrict calories, unless, you know, you want to turn anorexic and die.

Which you don't, the Thought Adjusting Wedgie machine will be coming to visit you if you disagree with that.

3) The other problem with those diet books is that they're usually fads and inflexible. Basically just eat this way and that's it. There is a well known saying in the fitness world that applies well to this. "Everything works... nothing works forever". In short you can't stick to one type of inflexible diet as eventually the body will adapt - the same is also true if you're doing the same workout week in and week out.

It probably does explain why people mindlessly jump from shitty fad diet to shitty fad diet and just hope. It makes about as much sense as being blindfolded, spun around 50 times and being asked to throw a dart at the bullseye on a dartboard.

From a marketing perspective, all the diet books are fantastic as they lead to a great amount of confusion as they often contradict each other and hide the truth that if you just eat sensibly and cleanly most of the time you will get much better results than just jumping from diet to diet whilst doing 1000000 hours on the elliptical trainer.

I know, I know, I've let the cat out of the bag a bit there

Being sensible + being consistent = good results.

Now don't get me wrong, it's simple but it's not necessarily easy. For a start it takes trial and error to figure out what works for you and what doesn't and it's not easy to resist the temptation to restrict calories too much too soon whilst over doing it at the gym. (that's NOT being sensible by the way)

Instead of looking around for the next fad diet and mindlessly buying into it, look around for systems. By that I mean look for products that don't just lay out a set food plan with some restrictions thrown in for cheap marketing purposes.

Look for products that offer a long term planning to the way you eat. That explains what you should and shouldn't eat and why. By understanding the why's it helps you to understand what is good for you. With a system based product you can have some guidelines and strive to work within them which will serve you a lot better than some 12 week fad.

It's usually at this point in an article you are provided the "solution" to all your needs with a handily placed affiliate link. To be honest, whilst I do sometimes put one in, I want this post to be more about making you think about what you're actually doing nutrition wise to get where you want to be. I don't want to lose the credibility of writing a useful piece of info and ruining it by turning it into cheap marketing tat.

If you would like to know what systemised products I would recommend following, drop me an e-mail and I'll let you know.