Observations: The real reason diets fail - Overview

Don't be so hard on yourself if you fail with your dieting efforts.  You were setup to fail before you even started. Saying this is NOT a free ticket to raid the closest pizza joint.  But no matter where you come from or what walk of life you have chosen the fact is we live in a nation that drives us toward perceived success in all things but health.  Our society is built to fail when it comes to living healthy.

That is why more times than not, diets fail. This is the overview of a multi-part blog post to help you see the big picture as to why it is all too easy to give up on living healthy. The goal is to bring about awareness of the influences on your daily lives where desensitization prevents us from succeeding at living a healthy lifestyle.

Focus

Others offering advice as to why we fail in dieting, focus too much on the details instead of bringing to light the big picture.

Do a Google search as to why diets fail and you will see a lot of the following reasons:

• Diets don't last. 
• Diets make you hungry. 
• Diets make you tired.
• Diets cannibalize your muscle.
• Poor Planning leads to failure.
• Diets can be expensive.
• Diets are temporary.
• Diets are only half of the equation.

All of these points are valid and true.  But none of these reasons focus on why it is so easy fall off the wagon, give up with little resistance and exhibit low thresholds of will power to sustain a healthy lifestyle.  Why is it so easy to blame something, someone or come up with some lame reason to give up?

Simply put... over the last 60-90 years we have been conditioned to live unhealthily.

Society and the blame game

It is all to easy to point at society for everything wrong in the world. Doing so makes it easy to dodge our own accountability.

However within this multi-part series... I will bring to light how our nation is built to fail when it comes to supporting healthy living and dieting.  In some ways society does carry the blame.  We are all part of society, so in reality we still need to blame ourselves and take responsibility.

Here is something to think about.  Living healthy is a combination of mental resolve, knowledge of what you need to be healthy and accessibility of materials to living a healthy lifestyle.

Think about the early settlers back in the early days of the U.S.  Their primary focus revolved around 3 things. Forage/acquire food, build shelter, cloth oneself and their family. Today we too have those basic needs in life and raise our children to become independent and start the cycle for the next generation.  So how is this making us fat?

How is this relevant as to why diets fail and why so many fail to persist in living a healthy lifestyle?

Stay tuned for part 1 of series that will be posted this Wednesday.