Dieting will not work long term.

You will not sustainably lose weight until you address the factors that made you fat in the first place. You may shed some timber for a specific event, or a short period, but it will not stay off and you are likely to get heavier if you don’t address the underlying factors.

Whats going on?

You are, in some way, a victim of the doom loop. You almost certainly weren’t born fat. You probably weren’t fat as a child, and then at some point you started to gain weight.

Lets start with a period of stress and inactivity. Perhaps exams, psychological issues, peer pressure and bullying at school, a family crisis, an illness leading to hospitalisation, or at least a time of recuperation. The inactivity is the important bit. This initial phase can be coupled with increased caloric intake for comfort eating / poor nutritional availability and so forth.

For most people, especially if there was a period of bed rest, some muscle mass is lost, or at least a significant reduction in exertion, as well as some fitness. This leads to a reduced caloric requirement as well as a shift in the endocrine (hormone) status. However, most people don’t account for this (and why would you, you’ve got other things on your mind), so gain a little bit of weight.

Not much, but just enough that, in combination with the loss of fitness, it adds up and the return to activity is hard work.

For most of us, the generally fit and healthy adults, especially if you’ve been reguarly active, we suck it up and get back on with it, the weight gain goes again and we break out of the issue.

However, far too many unconsiously remain inactive, or keep being kicked around the loop.

And, having seen the weight going up, the dress not fitting quite as well and generally not feeling quite so good about it all, we often attempt to correct course, either through exercise or through caloric restriction.

However. Both of these, and especially dieting is stressful. Cortisol increases, changing the way our body burns fuel, and for some of us, reducing the amount of energy the muscles use (probably an evolutionary throwback, since you are essentially inducing a famine state in the body by eating less so burning less is a good survival strategy). As we said ealier, you can lose weight short term but eventually the body will replenish the stores and it’ll all go back on again.

Now we’re into the doom loop. We are trapped in a cycle of stress / weight loss / weight gain / inactivity.

How to break out of it?

Don’t diet. Don’t even cut back on calories. To start with, don’t really go for it and hit the gym.

Your body needs to move regularly and have less stress to deal with.

And even if you can’t get rid of the external stress because the world is going crazy and the bills are stacking up and the dog next door like barking at the moon, then you can control the internal stress.

Drink less alcohol. Stop smoking. Go to bed for 8 to 10 hours. Turn off the social media firehose and stop scrolling netflix at 1am.

Then move. Just 5 minute movement snacks. You don’t even need to break a sweat, Non exercise related activity is how we should spend most of our lives.