What the Reason Diets Fail You

This year millions of people will start eating and most will not be able to lose weight. A common response to this failure of food vendors is to blame someone for the failure. This leaves a person feeling overwhelmed and guilty due to a lack of "willpower" Blaming the person and maintaining the illusion that the diet you eat is an effective way to lose weight. I think it’s time to move the discussion beyond this level of “suspicion” and explore the real reasons why food has failed. I will use an example to explain my position. When most people are introduced to something like a chocolate bar (candy) they soon feel the urge to eat it. Many will simply blame the chocolate for causing the craving. They will then be trying to fight the urge for “power of will”. They are often defeated in this battle and eventually admit and eat a chocolate bar. This “devotion” often marks the end of a diet. Now let’s look at why this “donation” happens. We know that the process of thinking that caused the craving to eat chocolate went like this; the sensory input was detected by the appropriate receptors [especially the eyes in this case] and his brain was some kind of sensory or sensory representation of what would be described as a chocolate bar. We can regard this process as inevitable. When sensory receptors are activated, the brain must develop a representation or image of the emotions of the object. When the neural image was created it has been taught to assign meanings, from memory, to these images as they occur in the brain. The sharing of meaning is followed by an emotional response to the assigned meaning. In the case of the chocolate bar the assigned description includes memories of past experiences of eating chocolate bars, which is why you look forward to eating this chocolate bar. So it was really not the existence of something that would be described as a chocolate bar that caused craving, but the process of understanding that was described. In particular it was the assignment of explanation that sparked the anticipation. And because this descriptive assignment is completely natural to most people, the chocolate bar finds a craving for cravings while actually having the power to make his mind a meaningless image. For many, the definition and image are "integrated", and the meaning now seen as a natural part of the neural image itself is something given within the mind. This gives the impetus the power to be the cause of the response. Just thinking or meditating on a chocolate bar has a similar effect. The neural image is formed from that impression and when it is subjected to a process of spontaneous giving of meaning to it it is exactly like the images caused by external stimuli. We feel a strong urge to eat a chocolate bar. All of this means that every time we are introduced to a bar of chocolate or other desirable foods, the brain automatically activates the cognitive process described and creates the desire to eat sweets. These ongoing emotional responses are uplifting and ultimately irritating. This is the reason we "give" and the food goes out the window. My point, then, is that the only way to reduce our food intake and feel free to alter this process of sharing meaning automatically in images that go into our heads. In this way we can reduce the need for junk food and thus change the way we eat to lose weight and avoid it. Diets do not provide these strategies and they actually fail a person not the other way around as their suppliers would like you to believe. If changing our behavior was as easy as deciding to go for a meal, most of us would change a lot of things for ourselves long ago. The fact is, we need strategies that will help us to bring about that change or to set ourselves up for failure. R.J. 2006