The Best Diet Is No Diet: How to Lose Weight Without Dieting

Diets are big business. Diet food is big business. Slimming products are big business. If we are going to talk about diets, you need to understand first and foremost that there is a ton of money to be made from the people who are desperate to lose weight and searching for answers. It is this very desperation which the makers of diets, knowledge and slimming products prey on.

In fact, the term "dieting" has become so distorted it's hardly recognisable from the very first patients in the 1800's whose doctors recommended dieting for the overweight condition they found themselves in.

If you have ever thought slimming products were the answer, you were being scammed. If you think the machines shown on infomercials are the answer, you are being scammed. If you think that counting calories is the answer, you are being scammed. If you think that deciding whether to spend your daily points on a slice of chocolate cake or a piece of lean sirloin is the key to losing weight successfully, you may just spend your entire life on earth being scammed.

How about the cookie diet? The cabbage soup diet? Fat free diets? Carb-free, protein free diets? How much longer will you allow them to scam you? The key to understanding what I am trying to say, is that you must never, ever believe that a diet program is going to change you, that it's going to change the way you relate to food. And this leads to the point of the article: the overweight problem is not about counting calories, or depriving yourself. The real problem is the way you relate to food.

Diet programs never seem to ever focus on this aspect; they only ever concentrate on what goes into your mouth. But if you have every been on a diet, you know that you may lose weight initially, but more often than not, all the weight you lost climbs right back on. Why? Because the root cause has not been addressed, and after a while, you fall off the wagon, put everything you lost back on, and most dieters have said they put on even more weight afterwards. This really should start telling you something. I am inclined to believe that most diet programs are designed to keep you coming back, or they are created by the 5% of the population who actually do manage to stick to a diet and lose the weight. It is these people who are able to give the raving testimonies of diet programs and slimming products. Do you believe me yet? For your sake, I sincerely hope so.

Let's get to the root of the overweight and obesity problem: if you are overweight, your lifestyle needs to change. The way you relate to food needs to change. You are relying on food to satisfy an emptiness inside you. Change the way you think about food, add some self-discipline to the mix and your life will forever be changed. You will lose weight without thinking about it. You will lose weight without feeling deprived. You will lose weight because you will eat less and exercise, and these two components are all you need to lose weight permanently.

I do however, understand that because it's a huge change, some guidance may be necessary:

1. As I have already mentioned, losing weight permanently is NOT about what you eat. It's about what's eating you.

2. To succeed, you must focus only on root causes, never on symptoms: why are you overweight in the first place?

3. Dieting does not work: clinical weight loss research has identified 12 specific things people do that have consistently been shown to lead to safe and lasting weight loss. Yet dieting is not even on the list! Nor are diet drugs, metabolizer pills, calorie counting, exercise machines, self-starvation, lo-cal foods, or weight reduction surgery.

4. Self-deprivation ALWAYS backfires.

5. Willpower has nothing to do with weight loss! Willpower is useless as a weight loss tool because it puts you at war with your own "hidden agenda," which is a product of unconscious motivations that mere willpower can never hope to control.

6. Food - any food - must stop being a reward or used for entertainment.

7. To succeed, you MUST involve your body, mind, and spirit: we are not just body, but body, mind, and spirit. As, alien as it may be to our thinking, the spiritual aspect of our existence is actually the most potent of the three, and the true source of our power to make change. Unless all three aspects of your being are involved and aligned toward your goal, lasting weight loss will almost certainly elude you. You need to seek God your Creator to help you, as He knows the true reason you are overweight and why you have not yet succeeded in achieving your goal. Those who neglect his vital step will more than likely find themselves forever searching for the "best diet".

8. The emptiness inside that you seek to fill with food, is actually a yearning for God. If you fill the emptiness with the things of God, you won't rely so much on food.

9. Set a realistic time frame: you didn't gain the weight overnight, and you can't healthfully lose it that way, either.

10. Become self-disciplined. This is probably the hardest step that needs to be conquered - how to dish up smaller portions, and exercising regularly.

11. The body needs exercise. If you don't exercise you may not lose weight at all.

For more guidance on losing weight without dieting, and to change the way you relate to food so that you can lose weight for good, please visit http://www.get-thin-for-good.com.

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