Recent decades have seen countless popular diet schemes that promised to help people shed unwanted pounds. But most people find that these are unsuccessful, especially in the long run. “Diets,” after all, are things people see as temporary. Few who go on restrictive diets expect to have to eat that way indefinitely. Even the most diligent dieters can find it hard to constantly resist temptation. And once people fall off the diet wagon, they often stay off, and their hard-lost pounds reappear a lot faster than it took to shed them. Repeated weight loss and weight gain, known as “yo-yo dieting,” can be detrimental to our health.
Over and over, research has shown that the key to achieving a healthy weight is moderation and long-term behavior change. Put simply, the most important factor is eating healthy, lower calorie meals while increasing exercise. Fasting does not work and can be harmful. Neither do fad diets.
One reason why many fad diets seem to work in the short-run is that they force us to pay attention — often very close attention — to what we eat. But it is hard to maintain that attention in the long run. The key, then, is to make those behaviors into habits.
Habitual Behavior
Most of our behaviors are habitual.