We all have choices on how we are going to live our lives, and where we are going to place our focus.  My choice may not resemble your choice. I am a “reduced obese” person who has maintained a “normal” weight for more than 9 years, after a lifetime of Yo You Dieting. See ABOUT ME for details.

Doing this has required my constant vigilance, ongoing effort, and tremendous focus, and even though I have been more successful than 95% of everyone who has ever accomplished a large weight-loss, it is been a tremendous personal struggle, and year-after-year, despite CONSISTENT and CONSTANT effort, my weight has continued to slowly creep upward in small increments over time.

This is despite the fact that the recorded daily calorie average of my food intake has been dropping lower and lower each year.

For example, at the start of 2015, my weight was the same as it was at the start of 2014, however, the average daily calories of all of my daily food intake during the year of 2014 was only 754 calories.

In 2013, the average daily calories of all of my daily food intake was 1033. So my average daily food intake was about 280 daily calories LESS than the prior year, and during that prior year, from the start of 2013 until the start of 2014, my body gained 8 pounds while eating that 1033 calories per day.

These are my personal facts, based on numbers which I recorded as accurately as humanly possible, every single day for the past 10 years. For years I felt like Garfield in the cartoon below, but now... instead of yelling "Liar" at the scale, I mentally yell "Liar" or "You Idiot" at the 'Diet Experts' who smugly believe the B.S. and provide to us the results of bad Research, while asserting that "Science Doesn't Lie".

NOTE: that I am a 5’0” tall, 70 year old, sedentary woman with a lower than average metabolism, and according to the Mifflin formula, the AVERAGE woman with my numbers requires only 1237 daily calories to maintain her current weight.

I give you this information so you can see that my recorded calorie numbers are not as far out in left field as some of you might first suppose. You can’t accurately compare my body’s numbers with your own body’s personal calorie calculation requirements if you are larger, taller, younger, more active etc.

That said, the difference between 1237 and 754 is around 480 calories, which is a reduction of nearly 40% of the “Average” calorie requirement. Remember, THIS CALORIE AMOUNT is to MAINTAIN my current weight. . which right now is just above the BMI borderline of “normal”

The past 4 years of the DietHobby ARCHIVES contain many articles detailing and discussing my struggles to maintain my weight-loss. Very few people lose as much weight as I have lost, and only about 95% of THOSE successful people have achieved the type of maintenance success that I am currently exhibiting.

I often question how long I can continue to eat such excessively tiny amounts of food while watching my weight continually creep upward; whether I am willing to continue my current behavior for the rest of my lifetime; and I honestly don’t know. Right now, I’m just taking it one-day-at-a-time, while searching for Guidance.

I can vouch for the accuracy, and I do agree with the mindset, of the following article based on my own knowledge and personal experience.

Failed at Dieting?
Welcome to the Almost Everyone Club!
                    by Ragen Chastain, www. danceswithfat

A question that I get asked pretty often is “If dieting doesn’t work, how is it possible that it’s such a popular recommendation even by doctors?”  I’m glad that you asked!

For the last 50 years the research that has been conducted regarding long term weight loss has shown that weight loss almost never works long term.  Yet we are constantly told by the media, the government, our doctors etc. that anybody who tries hard enough can lose weight and keep it off. Plenty of studies have shown that the body has a number of physiological reactions to weight loss that are designed to regain weight and then retain that weight. 

Yet we are told that those who regain their weight have just “gone back to their old habits.” But what really happens?

So a person begins one of a thousand intentional weight loss  (also known as a “lifestyle change”) programs.  They lose weight at first, then between 2 and 5 years after the loss they gain back all of the weight plus more, despite diligently maintaining their diet behaviors (aka “lifestyle changes”). They report these happenings to their doctor only to be told that they must not have been properly counting calories, they must have overestimated their movement. Their experience, they will be told, could not possibly have happened, it is impossible because…physics!  Or they tell their doctor that they couldn’t mentally and physically continue their dieting behaviors (aka “lifestyle change”) and are told again that they just weren’t trying hard enough.

All this despite the fact that their experience is exactly what the research tells us to expect. When millions of credible first person accounts match up with what research has found, typically that’s a good time to jump out of your bathtub and run around naked yelling “Eureka, I’ve found it.”

So why is dieting such a popular recommendation?  Those who are perpetuating this “weight loss works’ culture are doing a couple of things frighteningly well.

First, they are doing a great job of obfuscating the evidence.  Remember when a study found that Weight Watchers participants lost around about 10 pounds in six months and kept off half of that for two years (giving them a 3 year efficacy buffer but who’s counting) and Karren Miller-Kovach, chief scientific officer of Weight Watchers International at the time won the “I Said It With a Straight Face Award” when she told the media: “It’s nice to see this validation of what we’ve been doing.” Five pounds in two years.  Five pounds in two years.  Five freaking pounds in two freaking years?!?!?!?!?!.  But every time I say something about Weight Watchers people tell me how well it works (often, defying all logic, telling me that they’ve “done Weight Watchers 6 times and it worked every time“.)

Or the National Weight Control registry claiming to prove that weight loss works when the truth is that they would need 32,990,000 more success stories just to show a 5% success rate for dieting over the time they’ve been collecting data.  They’ve only managed to gather about 10,000 success stories since 1994, so they just moved the goal post and claimed victory at the fact that their numbers indicate that dieting works .009% of the time which means that if you walk to your Weight Watchers meeting in the rain you are three times more likely to die from a lightning strike than lose weight long term.

The second thing that they do alarmingly well is to discredit what are actually completely credible first person accounts of dieting failure.  Hundreds of thousands of people have diet failures every year.  Some of them have been convinced that they suddenly lost the ability to accurately maintain their diet behaviors, like people are saying “that’s weird, last week I could totally measure a cup of pasta but this week I forgot what a measuring cup is or how it works, so I just ate the whole package of spaghetti.”  They are told that they must be doing something wrong if they are regaining weight.  They are excoriated and discredited as “trying to justify their fatness”  (as if we need justification to exist in our bodies.)

But the diet industry and its cronies do it with shocking success.  Millions of people saying “I had the exact experience that research said was most likely” and somehow the diet industry, the government, and the medical establishment are able to discredit all of us in the eyes of the greater culture, often while continuing to profit.

This is all by way of saying that if you’ve tried dieting and ended up regaining all of your weight, or all of your weight plus more, then welcome to The Almost Everyone Club, we aren’t exclusive and we don’t have jackets (yet!) but we do have evidence and experience.  You have the right to claim and own the fact that you are indeed a credible witness to your experience, and you can refuse to allow someone else to substitute their completely  fabricated (and highly lucrative) experiences for your actual ones, and you can insist that they stop the diet roller coaster because you want to get the hell off.

The following is author Michael Neill's perspective on Natural Eating:

Working from the perspective of the Inside out, rather than from the Outside In, here is the way we would all naturally eat if we hadn’t been taught to eat differently.

When your body is hungry eat.
Eat what you want, not what you think you should.
Eat consciously and enjoy every mouthful.
When you think your body’s hunger is satisfied, stop eating.

Think about it - but for our societal training in mealtimes and childhood training using food as both reward and punishment, why would you ever eat if you weren't hungry?

If it weren't for all the information and misinformation around us about what we're supposed to eat, why would you ever even put something in your mouth you didn't want to eat?

But for our multi-tasking on-the-go culture and the fact that most of us try to eat what we should instead of what we want, why wouldn't you take the time to enjoy every mouthful of the food you are eating?

And but for everything we've learned about the importance of cleaning our plates and fears about being hungry later because we're not supposed to eat between mealtimes, why would you ever keep eating past the point of full?

Speaking as someone who has played around with numerous outside-in eating programs over the years, ranging from Atkins on one side to Potatoes not Prozac at another, I know first hand the allure of the outside-in. Everyone has cool sounding success stories and shiny scientific data, along with pictures of people who we just know we'll look like when we've followed the program for as long as they have.

Worse still, most outside-in eating programs actually work - for as long as you follow them. So we ignore the overwhelming data suggesting that diets are the most successful weight-gain programs in history and assume it must be our fault - if only we were more disciplined, or hadn't been born with the fat gene, or whatever our best guess as to why we're the only ones who can't make something work that statistically doesn't work for over 95% of dieters, we'd lose weight and keep it off for life.

But as always, life lived from the inside-out is simpler than that. When we're looking in the direction of what's natural as opposed to what's normal, we see that all the reasons we would eat when we weren't hungry have one thing in common - they're made of Thought.

We think it would be rude not to eat what we're given and immoral to leave food on our plates. We think we know better than our bodies about what they need to function optimally, and because we are so out of touch with our bodies, we collect evidence to make these thoughts seem even more real and substantive.

What about so-called "emotional eating"? Well, since every emotion is a thought, the feelings of insecurity, discomfort, stress and fear we eat to mask are really just misguided attempts to hide from our own thinking. And as I've said elsewhere, "there aren't enough cookies in the world to make you feel loved and whole."

Your well-being is innate. Your value and worth in the world is a given. And when you begin to see the nature of Thought, you view your own thoughts with a degree of perspective and neutrality that allows you to see right through them.

You are OK right now, regardless of what you weigh. That doesn't mean that if you consistently eat when you're not hungry that you won't face health risks - over time, you most assuredly will. It just means being thin won't make you a better person.

So the critical question isn't "what do you want to weigh?", "how do you want to look?" or even "how do you want to eat?"

It's just this:

"Do you want to live more or less in tune with your nature?"

Michael Niel is a "success coach" and author of several best selling books based on the 3 Principles. He has several informative YouTube videos, one of which is here in the DietHobby ARCHIVES in the article entitled:  Our Thoughts Create Our World.