Some diets are created with reason in mind, by nutritionists, doctors, personal trainers, and other people who really know their stuff.  Many of these programs are incredibly expensive, or inconvenient at the least.  For instance, nutrisystem would cost me nearly $400 a month to eat.  Jenny Craig doesn't even post prices on it's site, ostensibly because you can't put a price tag on your health, but I think it's because the cost is shocking.  They claim that it's "only a dollar more a day than the average American spends on food."  That's not very impressive if the average American is eating $8 value meals and $15 restaurant plates two to 12 times a week.  I spend WAY less than $400 feeding my WHOLE FAMILY each month.  Frankly, I don't know how an average person can afford to lose weight on one of these plans.  It certainly isn't sustainable to most folks I know.

 I think maybe the worst thing about diets, and the reason they fail, isn't really a diet's fault at all.  It's ours.  Our body's fault rather.  The human machine is incredibly adaptive, especially when it comes to nutrition.  The earthquake in Haiti trapped a guy for almost a month with nothing to eat.  He looked horrible when he got out, but he was alive.  He'd found some dripping water to keep him alive, but didn't have any food.  When you restrict your caloric intake for even short periods of time-as few as three or four days- your body figures out that it is getting fewer calories than it is burning, so it figures out how to burn less.  You might feel more sleepy, you might have less energy, your endurance might go into the toilet, and your strength might actually decrease while you are on a diet.  This is your bodies attempt to conserve energy by slowing down your metabolism.  That allows your body to store calories as fat instead of usable energy, which is a good plan for your body since it doesn't know when you will be eating enough calories to survive.  Additionally, when your body is prioritizing which body tissue to rebuild and maintain with the energy available to it, muscle takes a backseat because it is the most metabolically active tissue in the body.  It requires more energy to work and rest.  It provides strength to perform tasks involving moving and sitting.  It supports your posture.  It supports your joints.  Hell, it just makes you feel good.  But the problem here is that you're trying to LOSE FAT, right?  So wait.  Am I saying that diets tend to cause people to gain fat?  Sadly enough, I think it happens more often than not.  To back up my opinion, I'll point to all the different fad diets that come and go, all the people who have "tried every diet in the world" only to end up heavier than they started.  Diets are a problem.

So there you go, eating next to nothing, getting tired, no energy, your friends think you're a cranky asshole since you decided to lose weight, you're probably getting sick from poor nutrition, and to top it off, you aren't losing weight anymore, or possibly you're GAINING weight.  If you're like millions of Americans, you quickly figure out this diet doesn't work, and you go back to your old ways because even if they didn't work either, at least they felt good.  What's the answer?  Stay tuned for what works in my world.