What to Do After a Failed Fad Diet
Diets tend to fail, and those that promise fast weight loss through one weird trick are especially doomed to fail. If you’ve just been on one of these, don’t go on another fancy diet; Instead, take a moment to reflect on what you’ve learned and make a plan to eat healthier foods in the future.
But before you even get to the tips below, consider using this National Eating Disorder Screening Tool from the National Eating Disorders Association to test your attitudes towards food and your body image. NEDA also has a hotline that you can call or write.
Reprogram yourself
Each trendy diet comes with an explanation of why it is the best diet for you and why it will succeed where all other diets have failed. But no diet (or “eating habits”) has a magic secret that others overlook .
If you have followed the teachings of a particular diet guru, book, or internet forum for a month or two, you are likely immersed in the mythology of that particular diet. Write down some of the assumptions you held (sugar is toxic, or beans are full of anti-nutrients, or fatty yogurt is too many calories to fit into a healthy diet, or whatever), and see if they are really based on any scientific consensus …
The real truths about healthy eating are boring and obvious, such as that vegetables are healthy and there are many ways to reduce your calorie intake. You can let go of everything else.
Set realistic expectations
Trendy diets are promising and often result in faster weight loss than the old, healthy diet. This is what makes them so attractive, but it also goes to show that they are not really teaching you how to eat better.
The scale fluctuates from day to day, and it’s not just about gaining or losing fat. The food in your stomach weighs something; the same thing happens with water in all tissues of your body, making you heavier when you are more hydrated. If you eat a lot of carbohydrates, your muscles will have more glycogen and water; if you go on a low-carb diet, you will lose weight from the accumulation of glycogen (carbohydrates). In the meantime, if you have a menstrual cycle, you may find that at some time of the month you are heavier and at some time lighter.
For all of these reasons, short-term weight loss (or gain) is not always associated with fat. If you lost five pounds in the first week or two after an intense diet, chances are, there was actually very little fat actually – and you won’t stop your progress if you bring it back at some point.
If you lost weight quickly in a few weeks, you may have lost both muscle mass and fat. Muscles are important for overall health and also for you to be able to exercise, so after your diet is over or doesn’t work out, it’s actually beneficial to rebuild those muscles if you’ve lost too much.
Start from scratch
First, ask yourself if you really need to lose weight and why. And if your cause is health related, consider if you need professional help setting goals and planning.
All weight loss diets work in the same way, that is, they give you the basis for consuming fewer calories than you burn. There are tons of different ways to do this: you can count each calorie, you can reduce the amount of foods you eat from certain food groups, or you can eat slightly smaller portions of your regular meals, to name just a few. Choose the approach you like. If you see a steady change in the scale from week to week, then it works.
If you want to track calories or macros, we recommend Cronometer instead of the more popular MyFitnessPal ; its database is more accurate and its interface is much more user-friendly and user-friendly.
Actually eat some protein
Many diets do not take into account protein, but protein is important for health and is especially important during weight loss . Make sure you eat enough of it, and exercise with resistance to avoid losing too much muscle.
Eat all food groups
If you don’t eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and proteins (such as meat or tofu) every day, you may be missing something in your diet. Check out the basics at myplate.gov rather than trying to live off just yogurt and salads (or, on the other hand, just beef and bacon).
Develop good habits
This is where you can remember your fad diet experience. Is there anything you found easy about this? Not that it was cool, but something that you liked sometimes, that you didn’t really mind? Maybe you ate a ton of fruit that you forgot how much you love, or maybe you drank less alcohol because of the calories, but then realized that you like better sleep and avoid hangovers. If something is good for you and makes you happier, stick with it.
On the other hand, you probably also developed some bad habits on the emergency diet. For example, skipping meals or declaring certain foods completely prohibited. Either too much exercise (because you felt the need to burn calories) or not enough (because you were too tired all the time). Get rid of unpleasant or unhealthy habits and keep the good ones.
Eating healthy may be less exciting than the breakdown and burnout on a fancy diet, but in the long run, you’ll be happier and healthier.