Their commercials are so enticing. They hit all your trigger points, your pain points, you suddenly believe that they understand you in a way no one else possibly can. Certainly they will help you to finally lose all the weight you’ve been carrying around for so long.
This is it.
Or not.
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you’ve fallen prey to some very excellent marketing ploys. In fact, if you’re in marketing, you could learn a thing or two listening to weight loss commercials. The spend a lot of money interviewing experts on the art of persuasion.
Don’t believe me? Read Kim Brittingham’s Read My Hips. In her revealing memoir on being fat, Kim tells of her true-life experience as a weight loss counselor for one of the top weight loss companies in the world. Her job wasn’t to help her clients lose weight. It was to make the company more money. If the client’s didn’t make adequate progress, they didn’t fire them, the told them it wasn’t their fault. All they had to do was sign up for a longer stint with the program. Perhaps those poor people just needed someone to talk to, and if they had sought counseling perhaps they would not only weigh less, but would have a healthier bank account.
Those companies are not designed to help you lose weight. They use your desire to lose weight to pad their pockets.
To make matters worse, those weight loss plans don’t do a thing to help you lose weight and keep it off. There is nothing sustainable about their products.
An additional problem with most weight loss approaches is that the methods typically slow your metabolism. By restricting calories, we put our bodies into a state of hibernation or the belief that we are experiencing a famine. The human body is absolutely amazing, it will reduce the number of calories it consumes on a daily basis during times of want. Exactly the opposite you want to have happen when you’re looking to lose weight!
How about the crazy eating plans that have you eat all the carbs you want, but no fat or protein? Or all the fat and protein you want but no carbs? None of these are a good way to lose weight and keep it off. In addition, your body begins to suffer from lack of certain nutrients and you cause more problems than you’re fixing.
The next time you see a headline on a women’s magazine that promises you will lose ten pounds in ten days . . . Run! Far in the opposite direction. Sure, they have a few people who have before and after pictures that seem to give credence to their claims. But no one is vetting those people and their photos. They could have done it any number of ways.
Take a look at the celebrities who used to be spokespeople for various diet plans. After a couple of years, they gained weight again, and they are no longer featured by that company. If a celebrity can’t sustain their weight loss, why do you think you can? Oh, but that’s what they want! You as a repeat customer.
The worst news of all is that most foods on pre-packaged diet plans is that they are merely chemicals masquerading as food. They are all heavily processed to the point that you need an advanced chemistry degree to decode the ingredients on the side of every package.
You will have much more success if you return to making your own nutritious meals out of ingredients that you purchase yourself at the market. Feature as many whole foods at all of your meals as possible and you’ll be much healthier for it.
No, those protein bars won’t cut it. Please, look at the ingredients. They are “fortified” with this and that vitamin which means somewhere in the processing stages, those vitamins were stripped away.