Those who have never struggled with being overweight sometimes don’t understand why it’s so difficult. “Just quit stuffing your face,” is a common refrain. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near that simple for someone who has struggled with this problem for most of their lives. Those that do attempt to take this advice don’t often succeed, precisely because there really isn’t any advice to follow. A good weight loss center will take that advice and turn it into something concrete and more sustainable than crash dieting. They will teach their clients a new way to look at food and exercise and give them the tools they need to incorporate it into their lives. Not just for the next three months, but forever.
Another concept that a weight loss center will typically understand is that no foods need to be entirely off limits. Yes, eating chocolate cake on a daily basis is going to have an adverse effect on your waistline. But eating it once a month won’t. Then again, there are those who can’t control themselves when it comes to their trigger foods. For them, eating a single small slice of chocolate cake would be akin to a recovering alcoholic deciding that it would be okay to have just one beer every now and then. It simply doesn’t work for them.
It is because of these differences that few popular diets work in the long run. You can’t expect something that some guy came up with to make a million dollars to have much effect on how you live the rest of your life. Yes, just about any fad diet will work in the short term. That’s why they get so popular. They repackage science and hand it back to you with new and exciting buzz words and suddenly carbs are bad. Suddenly it’s fat that is bad. Then it’s neither. Then it’s both. A good weight loss center will tell you that no macronutrient is inherently “bad”. There may be certain foods that are bad for you, in particular, but very few that are bad outright.