Why Diets Fail: The Industry, the Cravings and the On-Off Cycle

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Think about the last time a diet ended. Most of us can say the date, the occasion and the exact food that finished it off, and then we spent the next week blaming ourselves. Tracey Trimmer, who wrote The Trimmer Method, says you were never the problem, and she has a lot to say about who benefits when you think you are.

What the diet industry gets from your next attempt

Tracey's view of the diet industry is blunt. She says weight-loss companies have built products and services that help you lose a couple of pounds, but that make you keep needing them to hold on to the loss.

You may know how that goes. You join a popular service and lose some weight. Then the fees start to feel like too much, you quit, and almost as soon as you stop paying, the weight creeps back on. Tracey says the worst part is that most people decide the failure was their own fault. She says plainly that you are not at fault.

How diet foods can set off the cravings they promise to cure

Have you ever eaten something sold as healthy or diet-friendly, and found an hour later that you could not stop thinking about more of it, even though you were not hungry?

Tracey says that is no accident. She points to ingredients found in many diet foods, such as high-fructose corn syrup, MSG and sugar alcohols, and says they create strong cravings for more of the same, both physical and psychological. So the packet that was meant to help you lose weight keeps you reaching for the next one.

Her answer is to leave diet products on the shelf and eat real food you actually like.

Why willpower is the wrong thing to blame

Tracey says her method takes the psychological side of weight loss into account as well as the physical side. In her words, your appetite and your emotions need to be satisfied, as well as your body.

That changes how you read your own history. If you have ever eaten when you were not hungry, Tracey says emotional eating is your body's way of telling you something is missing from your life. It might be rest, exercise, the company of friends, conversation, laughter, love or fun. She says that when you eat for emotional reasons you never fill the hole, because food is what you reach for as a stop-gap and never what you needed.

A diet cannot fix that. A diet only adds rules on top of it, and the rules make you hungrier and more tired than before.

Living on a diet and falling off it

Notice the language we use. You are "on" a diet, or you are "off" it. Being off means you have failed, and being on means you are waiting for the day it ends.

Tracey says there is not a single diet that will help you lose weight quickly and keep it off for good, whether it is low-carb, low-fat or low-calorie. What works, she says, is a new way of living that is completely different from the diets and exercise plans you have tried. With that, there is no on and no off. There is just the way you eat.

What a diet-free way of living looks like on the plate

• You eat more, not less, with six meals a day, so you are never running on empty.
• No food is forbidden, and bread and potatoes stay on the menu.
• There are no supplements, shakes or special products to buy.
• You decide for yourself how much is enough and what full feels like.

Tracey says she was once clinically obese, that her life revolved around the next meal, and that she still loves her food. She says she lost sixty pounds with this program and has kept it off for years. That is her own story. Results vary from person to person, and anyone with a medical condition or on medication should talk to their doctor before changing how they eat.

The program behind the idea

The Trimmer Method comes in a version for women and a version for men. It costs $37 as one payment, down from $49.95, and it includes three bonuses worth over $85 together. One of them is a report on breaking the habit of emotional eating, which speaks to the question at the heart of this article. The 60 Day Ironclad Weight Loss Guarantee gives you 60 days to email The Trimmer Method Support Team for a full refund.

If the next diet is one you are not sure you want to start, watch Tracey's free presentation on the official site first.

Click here to see The Trimmer Method and step out of the on-and-off cycle.