What Do You Need For Your Diet to Work?

Desire!

Right this minute, you may want a pinwheel cookie -- the kind with chocolate on the outside that looks like paint and tastes like plastic -- but has such cool sprinkles. Yeah, you've loved them as long as you can remember. You want one so bad that you can already see yourself driving to the store to find some. However …

We all face desires like this all the time, whether for a cookie, a pint of Häagen Dazs, a stiff drink, a cigarette, even a neighbor's spouse. Out of nowhere, we suddenly desire something that we know isn't good for us -- something we may not even really want. Yet, if we act on these desires, we can wind up obese, alcoholic, cancerous or divorced.

Researchers at the University of California San Francisco looking into the causes of obesity say all these desires have the same basic roots -- and the same basic cures!

Why All Diets Work

Researchers say that on average, people lose weight no matter what program they choose. Grapefruit diets, chocolate diets, Christian diets, 12-step programs, prescription pills, personal trainers -- they all "work."

If you put yourself on virtually any weight-loss program, chances are you're going to lose weight.

How can all these wildly different paths all seem to go toward the same destination? The answer is simple:

Every weight-loss program, no matter how good or crazy, sets limits and so gives people a sense of control. Sometimes the most strict (or even bizarre) diets seem to work best because they set the strictest limits.

Nearly every successful weight-loss program has some source of nurturing: a weekly meeting, a personal trainer, a counselor, a Alcoholics Anonymous-type “sponsor” whose job it is to talk you out of eating that tub of Häagen Dazs.

A combination of limits and nurturing allows almost everyone to lose weight.

Want to Make It Permanent?

If all these programs cause people to lose weight, why has there been a 36 percent increase in obesity over the last ten years? Because we lose and gain it all back, lose again, then gain it all back.

Such yo-yo dieting is actually dangerous. Traditional weight-loss programs -- the personal trainer, the weight-loss drug, the rigid diet-and-exercise program--all rely on external sources of nurturing and limit setting, and external solutions are inherently fragile and unstable. The drive to overeat is so primitive and so deep that a real solution to weight problems requires far more than mustering the will to diet, praying for redemption from gluttony or calling one's sponsor daily.

Your change must be internal – personal – dealing with those six questions:
        "How do I feel?"
        "What do I need?"
        "Do I need support?"
        "Are my expectations reasonable?"
        "Is my thinking positive and powerful?"
        "What is the essential pain, the unavoidable risk -- and the earned reward, the benefit?"