Drop the Weight with Ej Ogenyi: 3 Reasons Diets are a Waste of Your Time

When your favorite clothes start to fit a little tighter or you start to see the undeniable proof of weight gain staring back at you in the mirror, your first instinct might be to ramp up your workouts or go on a diet to fix it. Today I’m going to share three reasons why shifting into diet mode will land you right back where you are in no time.

I’m not saying this to be negative, but to share why it happens so you know how to create a lasting solution.

Here are the three reasons…

You’ll spend more time figuring out how to do the diet “right” than you spend taking action

There are very few weight loss diets that have simple instructions. Most of them tell you to:

• cut out food groups,
• avoid a lot (if not all) of the foods you love,
• eat specific percentages of nutrients,
• or measure your portions down to the gram.

Just reading that list is exhausting because you have other things going on in your life besides dieting. And actions like these require you to spend precious time trying to figure things out up front when you could be spending time taking action and seeing results.

Instead of spending your time figuring out how to even get started on a diet, you could replace your processed snacks with fresh fruit and you replace your drinks with water and plain tea or coffee. This will help you:

• stay hydrated,
• boost your metabolism,
• cut calories without cutting out your snacks,
• and cut your processed food intake in a way that’ll have you seeing and feeling the difference within a week.

And these are things you can start doing almost immediately!

You learn how to eat for weight loss in a single scenario
When you select a diet, it’s usually because it’ll get you the results that you want right now. But one critical flaw is that it doesn’t support you when it comes to specific life stages.

For instance when you get pregnant, are breastfeeding, or are recovering from an illness, a diet isn’t ideal except it was created for your particular situation.

But if you have a healthy eating routine that supports weight loss – i.e. eat healthy foods in the right portions – you can change up your portions to take care of yourself in these special life situations.

That’s one of the benefits of VAFs™, the  trademarked mental model I created to teach healthy eating that supports weight loss. Once you get used to the model, you can adapt it for your specific life stage.

It works wonders for my clients who travel a lot as it makes it easy for them to make healthier decisions even as they focus on the purpose of their trip instead of obsessing over how to get foods that are on plan.

And it worked for me when I was pregnant with my first child, helped me lose the baby weight while breastfeeding, and supported my transition after I stopped.

I created a cheat sheet to give you the basics of VAFs, and you can download it for free by clicking here…

You probably won’t continue eating that way once the diet is “over”
This is probably the reason that you’re reading this right now. Most diets end up being a temporary tactic to lose weight now. And when the diet is over, it’s back to eating the foods you love again.

But your body doesn’t quite work that way. When you lose weight, your body tries to get used to a new normal of how you eat. And your body also loves to maintain balance, so when you go back to eating normally, your body is going to pile the weight back on and then some.

That’s why your best bet if you want to lose weight and keep it off, is to use approachable solutions that you feel you can do long term. This doesn’t mean you don’t push your comfort zone, it just means you push the boundary of what you’re capable of to something you can sustain long-term.

It’s time to take action

What you can do next is focus on eating healthy instead of going on a diet or using a detox. I know it sounds like a cliche but once you figure out how to make healthy eating work for you, you can do it consistently.

And taking action consistently, before and after you get results, is what will help you prevent future weight gain.

This works because your healthy eating habits will be ingrained and all you have to do is make small tweaks to handle the ebbs and flows of your life like your busy season in your business or getting back into shape after a pregnancy.

You won’t be searching from one diet to the next anymore, instead you’ll be grounded in a simple way of eating that helps you look and feel how you want.

Don’t forget to grab the cheat sheet that’ll help you get started. It’s the “Healthy Eating Made Easy Cheat Sheet” and in the cheat sheet, you’ll get:

A mental shortcut to help you save time when putting together healthy meals
A good start to making healthy meal choices that support how you want to look and feel every single day!

Click the here to grab your cheat sheet.

Photo Credit: Syda Productions | Dreamstime.com