If you’ve ever gone on a diet and succeeded in achieving your weight loss goals, then I am willing to bet you can relate to what I am about to say. Maybe you can even guess what I am going to say because you’ve experienced one or even all three of these for yourself.

But that’s not how it typically goes. You diet down, get there, celebrate for at least 30 minutes, and then you think, “Okay, now how do I not screw this up?”

You see, there’s a huge gap between what most people expect to happen after they get to their weight loss goal versus what really happens.

Today, I’m going to share 3 of the most surprising (and common) reasons why you can’t maintain your weight loss after a diet.

1. Diets make your body feel deprived.

Near the end of most diet programs, calories are low and things like carbs, sodium, fruit, and dairy have been drastically reduced or removed from the plan. It’s common to feel tired (ahem… exhausted) and to find yourself daydreaming about your favorite non-diet-plan foods.

You think this is just because your body is detoxing from old habits, sugar, and whatever non-healthy things you’ve pinpointed as the culprit, but it’s not.

This is your body saying, “Hey, I deserve to feel pleasure from food and you are denying me of that.”

Eating is like sex. It’s supposed to be enjoyable. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t do it and mankind would not go on. So, it’s natural and good for us to get pleasure from food.

At the end of a restrictive diet, your body is screaming to be taken care of. It wants comfort and pleasure and it can only go on feeling deprived for so long before you are so worn down that you “fall off the wagon” and binge.

Most people don’t know how to start re-introducing the off-limits-while-on-the-diet foods back in. Which leads us to #2…

2. You develop an unhealthy relationship with food.

If you’ve been on many diet plans, I’m betting you know this feeling well. FEAR.

Fear of not just cookies and ice cream, fear of everything! Everything you’ve heard somewhere, somehow is bad for you or is going to make you fat or bloated.

The list goes on and on.

I went through this when I got to my weight loss goal and I’ve worked with women that have felt this way in the past too (whether they reached their weight loss goal or not).

So afraid to eat the wrong thing that they end up eating nothing at all. Standing at the refrigerator, staring at their options feeling confused and afraid of choosing the wrong thing and screwing up all that they have worked for.

Being so scared of facing the temptation when going out to dinner for a night of fun with friends, that they make up a silly excuse and stay home with their chicken and steamed broccoli instead because it feels safer.

Or worse, saying screw it and overeating everything in sight because they don’t know how to manage the fear any other way.

3. Underestimating normal weight fluctuations.

Here’s the thing, when you are eating normal healthy portions of carbohydrates, your body naturally fluctuates in weight because carbs hold more water. This is not a bad thing—it’s just the way it is.

It’s not a reason to avoid them forever, but for many people that don’t realize this, it can send them into a real freak out. They want to eat the foods they’ve been missing, so they start adding carbs back in, see the numbers on the scale going up, and go into mega-panic mode.

Sure, short-term diets can produce speedy results, but the real question is: Do they produce lasting results?

More times than not, the answer is no because you never learn how to build the overarching habits and lifestyle that supports long-term weight loss maintenance.

Can you relate?

I bet you’ve got a great example from your own life. Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

http://sheilaviers.com/cant-maintain-weight-loss-after-a-diet-3-surprising-reasons-you-struggle/