The Top 5 Things All Diets Have in Common

I have been involved in a personal quest to find the ultimate diet for as long as I can remember. Since I was a very small child I battled with weight issues and tried a variety of methods for losing weight. I finally 'hit bottom' and got serious about weight loss at the age of 21 when I topped the scale at the doctor's office at 396 pounds. For the last 16 years I have fought the battle of the bulge, and have tried numerous diet methods and studied countless others. Some worked for a time, some didn't, some didn't suit me enough to give a real try and some were insane. I have come down to 192 pounds in that time and it has been my experience that every diet has the following factors in common -

Drink More Water: Every diet recommends more water. From the classic "5-8 8 ounce glasses per day" to the mantra "Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate!", each and every diet on the market recommends more of what we are primarily made of, namely good 'ol H2O. In addition to headaches, nausea, and poor immune system function, dehydration can negatively impact your metabolism and that helps keep on the fat.

Eat Less: Ok, yeah, duh! This one is bloody obvious. Some diets try to obfuscate the fact that they are trying to lower your caloric intake, but they all have a touch of this most apparent way to lose excess weight. At the very least, taking in less will help you to not gain and allow the next tool to do its job.

Move More: Exercise. Metabolic boosting. Calorie burning. In addition to simply being good for you, being fit helps to trim off the excess weight and/or transform it into more useful matter such as muscle.

Make Better Food Choices: "You are what you eat." There is a reason that saying is age old. I am not one to suggest removal of fat from the diet since fat is what keeps our joints healthy and contributes to long term endurance, but I am a champion of replacing "crap" with quality.Get More Rest/Sleep:Amen. The first thing to go when you get insufficient sleep is energy levels. That energy is most easily replaced in the short term with an elevated caloric intake. Being tired makes you hungry, and you reach for more food. The next thing to go is your basil metabolic rate so now the extra food to keep you going during the day more easily turns to stored fat. Next, your immune system takes a hit leading to more frequent sickness and further lowering of your metabolism. (And, of course, we all know the way to deal with a cold is to feed it.)The above factors form the core of a great many of the diets available on the market. They layer on various flavors of bells & whistles, but if you strip away the fluff, these factors are all there.

There is a sixth factor that is terribly common for commercial diets, failure. This is nottrue for 100% of all participants of conventional diets, so it doesn't make the Top 5, but the vast majority of diets either fail outright, or fail in the long term. In my mind the most basic reason is this: There is no easy fix. It takes months and years of unhealthy choices to put on enough weight that most people are willing to do something about it. To imagine that it won't take a long commitment to undo the damage is wishful thinking. Yes, most diets can produce examples on demand of people they worked quickly and efficiently for. Those are the lucky minority. The statistics simply don't work in the favor of diets.

To my thinking, part of that is a basic definitional problem with what the word "diet" has come to mean. The root Greek word for diet is diatia which is literally, manner of living, from diaitasthai to lead one's life. I prefer to think of it now in those terms, and see the issue as being one of changing the very basis of my manner of living.

To that end I employ the above five factors without the bells & whistles. I do this with an aim not towards improving my physical condition, but rather improving my manner of living. I think one of the key reasons that the vast majority of diets fail is that they work in reverse. My teenage dreams went something like this - My life is terrible because I am too fat. Lose the weight, get the girl, the dream job, the money, the stuff.

My actual life has played out more like - Lose some weight, get support from friends and family, get a new hobby for an exercise form (martial arts), get a bit happier, gain some weight back, get desperate and start a commercial diet along side exercise hobby, make new friends, lose some weight, gain some back, switch to a new diet, get a girlfriend, lose some more weight, get more comfortable with self, gain some weight back, switch diets, gain more weight and get depressed, get support from friends and family, lose more weight, move into dojo (accelerating exercise hobby), gain back some weight, marry girl friend, switch diets, gain back some weight, give up on diets, accelerate hobby (start managing dojo and instructing), gain more weight, address basic lifestyle choices, lose a lot more weight.

Or, something like that.

Excess weight is a physical condition, but it is very often not from a physical cause. The cause is (in my case) emotional and spiritual, and basically boils down to a whole lot of fear. It was not until I reversed my method and learned tools to address the root causes that made eat excessively that I made any authentic progress in cleaning up my "manner of living." I believe that we can only lose weight in a long term fashion when we get at the root causes and stop treating the unsightly symptoms.

The last factor that most diets have in common is universality. They all, to one degree or another, make a blanket judgment on what will work for anyone carrying excess weight. Some of the more enlightened methods leave a lot of wiggle room but there is still a back drop of "one size fits all". To really get at the core issue for an individual, the method needs to be individual, and that is supported more by a path for living rather than a packaged diet. To imagine that the same weight loss diet will help a person whose weight gain is a result of thyroid dysfunction as well as a person who was taught as a child that the ability to eat sweets is equal to freedom and self-worth, is pure lunacy.

What is needed is a path, and good advice. Then, each individual can come to terms with what works for them. Into this I inject a fierce sense of independence and savagely defend the right to make up my mind for what practices I take up. I may, in fact, take wholecloth a methid used by another. That method may work beautifully, but by keeping the final decision mine I maintain a strong accountability, and that it the difference between a chosen "manner of living", and a commerical "diet".