Why do diets fail?

I was perusing the blogs that I follow and I came across a post from Camille, a physician from Corpus Christi in which she discussed her recent trip to the nutritionist as a part of her pre-op insurance requirements. Here’s a link if you didn’t catch the blog: http://livinglargeincc.blogspot.com/2010/03/birthdayspresents-and-not-cake.html

Camille was reflecting on why she overeats and there was great discussion from a bunch of people who, like Camille, are not unhappy people who had horrible childhoods that drove them to abuse food as adults.

I posted the following comment:

I think that the common assumption is that people who have weight problems are lazy, not very smart, disorganized and/or have no self-control, but I think most of us know that that is total BS. I really think that it is all the years of dieting that screw us all up. We get wrapped up in this cycle of eating too much and feeling bad about it and then making bad food choices because we are ashamed and then starving ourselves which triggers a binge. If you look at ANY weight loss program, you will see in their fine print that the advertised results ARE NOT TYPICAL. This means that most people do not lose weight and keep it off on Jenny Craig or WW or Adkins or any other commercial program or diet. But the assumption is that WE are the problem and not the diet. I cannot imagine any sane person buying a product that doesn't typically work as advertised.

As I typed it, I felt like it was a blog entry in the making all in itself so I wanted to explore it a bit here.

First of all is the issue of the weight loss results not being typical. Here are a couple of examples:

Nutrisystem
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*Results not typical.

Medifast
Medifast makes no claim that these results are representative of all participants on the Medifast Program.

Weight Watchers
Read about someone like you*
Browse through these selected Success Stories …you may find someone who started out just like you. Find out how people with similar challenges made it to their weight-loss goals.
*Results not typical

I find it kind of bizarre that we as consumers would put up with this for so long. Imagine if you were planning to buy a car and you read the advertisement to see that the vehicle got great gas mileage, had air bags, and offered a smooth ride. You were about to make the purchase when you noticed that the majority of people who’d bought this car DID NOT get the advertised gas mileage, air bags or smooth ride. You probably wouldn’t buy that car and you would be outraged that this kind of advertising is permitted.

But not with diet programs. When they fail, we blame our self. Why is that?
I went on my first diet when I was about 10 or 11 and I have steadily gained weight ever since. I wonder what would have happened if I’d never dieted.
The problem is that I now cannot determine the difference between not being on a diet and eating whatever the H. E. double hockey sticks that I want. When did I lose the ability to listen to my body and know when it was hungry and when it was full? Did I give this power to a diet company that told me what and when and how much to eat, regardless of what my body wanted and needed?

The other issue is that of overweight people lacking something as human beings that allows them to reach this sorry state. For some reason I keep thinking about this old episode of The Brady Bunch where Alice and Mrs. Brady went on diets. Of course Alice (who really wasn’t fat) couldn’t follow the diet. She didn’t have the will-power. And lovely Mrs. Brady (who also wasn’t fat) and who had supposedly birthed three children, had tons of will-power, but ultimately she couldn’t follow the diet either.

I know that overweight people are no less-intelligent, less-organized, less- motivated and possess no less will-power than the average person. I, for one, graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Oregon, own my own business, and have accomplished many professional and personal goals in my life.

I’m not beating my head against a wall anymore. I’ve been overweight for nearly seven years and before that, off and on since I was a kid. I’m tired of letting food and weight issues run my life. I’m finally doing something different, something in which the successful results ARE typical. Because I ran across another interesting bit of information today as I was blogging. It was a study by the original developers of the lap band weight loss surgery. They tracked nearly 2,000 patients for 12 years and the average patient lost 96.14 lbs. after surgery and continued losing weight over the course of the study. Those are the results that we can expect. Yeah!