Diets Fail?

Is it any wonder why so many diet plans fail?

In one research project conducted between February 2003 and October 2005 by the Stanford Prevention Research Center and the Department of Medicine, Stanford University Medical School, in Stanford, California, USA. 311 obese women were recruited to follow one of the following popular diet programs:

AtkinsDiet, Zone Diet, LEARN Diet or Diet Ornish.

At the beginning of the research program, every woman was assigned a randomly chosen diet program.

Each woman was required to attend 8 classes, each lasting 1 hour which explained the instructions on how to follow their assigned diet plan. When the classes were finished they followed their assigned plan for 1 year.

The result?

All the women lost significant weight over the first two months. Afterwards the weight loss tapered off and at the conclusion all of the women had weight loss far from their expectations. No group in the varied diets lost more than an average of 5 kilograms over a period of 1 year . . . Pathetic.

The women concluded that the diet they were on wasn’t working and that they had probably been put on the wrong program, adding that they should have been put on the program that their friends had been on, one of the other study programs, the results of which are the same.

According to me the failure of these diets is very simple.

First, all the experimental diets employ the difficult task of accurately measuring the amount of calories to be eaten in a day. Second I think the results demonstrate that the number one reason for failed diets is the self discipline of sticking to the diet itself, thinking that there is a simpler way to diet.

Another way of expressing it is to say that the more complicated the diet is, the higher the possibility of long term failure due to switching to a different diet and hoping for better results.

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