Diets Don’t Work Dammit!

How’s that for a catchy article title?

There really is no other way of putting it to be honest; if you are trying to lose weight and/or get healthier a “diet” is not going to give you the results you really want (and in some cases might actually be a detriment to your goals in the long run).

Now, I am not talking about long-term diets specifically designed to manage certain aspects of your health like low sodium diets, gluten-free diets (assuming your doctor has actually put you on one and you are not drinking dirty hippie water and jumping on a bandwagon), etc… I am talking about the never-ending parade of nonsense programs like those claiming to get people into bathing suit shape in 3 months.

These and all the other ridonkulous claims out there are a sham, a fake, a dissimilation I say!

Lego Hulk angry at stupid question!

Why am I so incensed right now? Well I am glad you asked!

Now that we are a couple of weeks into the New Year, and people are already trying desperately to cling to their poorly constructed New Year’s Resolutions (check this article out if you need some help sticking to or restructuring yours), the pleas for help are flooding the social media airwaves!

If I see one more supposedly intelligent adult blindly asking random people on the internet “What diet should I try to help me lose weight?” I am going to have a Jerd-Rage induced aneurysm.

The simple truth is diets don’t work. They never have, they never will.

So let’s dive into where they fall short and what you can do to avoid wasting time and effort on these sorts of food based shenanigans!

The myth of the diet succeeds because people, in general, are lazy and will believe anything if it promises the result they want for less effort. This is why all of these fad diets continue to make the rounds.

• The Cabbage Soup diet
• The Adriana Lima diet
• The NV Diet Pill
• The Unicorn Tears and Baked Leprechaun diet

All them promise a magic outcome with little effort or personal responsibility, and all of them are full of crap (except maybe the Unicorn and Leprechaun diet, that one actually might be magical).

They cater to the type of people who when asking fitness or nutrition professionals how to improve themselves will immediately follow whatever well thought out answer they get with questions like “Do I have to stop eating fast food?“, “How long is this going to take?” or “How much weight will I lose by next month?”

Other people take their fail in a different direction and go overboard; reading a hundred different articles on a hundred different websites on how many calories they should eat, the exact milligrams of sodium and protein required a day, what South American super-fruit is being touted as the next thing in fat burning, etc… These people will spend all day reading health websites and magazines, finding conflicting information galore, and then suffering from ‘analysis paralysis‘ and end up doing nothing at all.

Both types of people tend to get frustrated quickly after a few weeks go by and they haven’t taken 10 years worth of Mountain Dew abuse off their waistlines though.

Then they quit altogether, dejected by their perceived failure, or they jump from diet fad to diet fad, from one bandwagon to another, without ever getting to the root cause of their problems.

The problem with “diets” are they are unsustainable! Even if you manage to lose weight, you will almost always gain it right back!

People who successfully undergo a change in their life (What we here at the Jerd call a Heroes Transformation) don’t crash diet hoping to develop abs for bathing suit season; they know that following some snake-oil drenched 5-week get-fit program sold via infomercial at 2am on Comedy Central will get them nowhere.

Successful people have made calculated and consistent changes to their lives instead; one meal and one workout at a time!

Here’s the brutal reality of it. Getting in shape and losing weight isn’t necessarily fun but at least it is easy to figure out; eat right and exercise regularly.

BOOM! Knowledge!

Diet and exercise are all it takes! Just incase some people are reading this and saying “But I saw someone on Dr. Phil say that I can follow this plan and…” let me stop you right there and say it again for you, slowly… Eat.right.and.exercise.regularly.

Got it?

Ignore the programs marketed with big promises and fast results, ignore lame and bogus hooks like “belly fat targeting!” or “lose weight while eating chocolate!” These diets aren’t written to help you lose and maintain a healthy weight; they’re written to fatten the author’s wallet.

Diets don’t work!

They (sometimes) provide temporary results without teaching you the lessons to healthily maintain them which perpetuates a never-ending cycle that looks like this:

Dissatisfaction -> Fad diet purchase -> Short-term Success -> Euphoria -> Return to normal life -> Degradation of results due to no real change in habits -> Dissatisfaction -> Another fad diet purchase -> Rinse and repeat

If you are unhappy with your weight you have to realize that it probably took you years and years of poor food and exercise choices to get to where you are. Like it or not, it is going to require months of work and lots of willpower to transform yourself into the person you want to be.

So to answer all of you asking “What diet works best?” let me sum it up.

None of them!

Stop eating shitty food, stop eating so damned much, and stop sitting on your ass all night long after work. Simple enough for you?!?

Good, now I need to go take a deep breath or three.

While I am doing that make sure to stay engaged! Drop a comment (first person to ask what diet they should try gets a Judo chop to the pancreas) and let me know what has worked for you below!

PS: Make sure to get your free e-book, “The 7 Fitness Obstacles Newbies Face” by subscribing to our newsletter… no spam, I promise!