Weight Maven

Michael Allen Smith just tweeted one of his archived blog posts about his experiences with the Zone diet. About the “worst diet” he writes:

The worst diet isn’t the one that doesn’t work. The worst diet is the one that works extremely well in the short term, but fails in the long term. The diet that never works gets discarded and the dieter can move onto a new approach. The one that works only in short-term followed by a return in weight gain is more confusing to the dieter. They almost always blame themselves for not sticking to the diet and if they only stuck with it they would be successful. They rarely conclude that the failure of the diet in the long term wasn’t their fault. Years go by and the loyalty remains and so does the weight.

I think that the debacle that is the weight loss industry is largely due to two factors: one is our weight-obsessed culture and the other is that it can be so easy to lose in the short term.

I for one wish that there was more research into what I call the dark side of dieting … for some of us, those “works well in the short-term diets” add up … literally.