Dieting: I Can't Afford To Lose Weight!

We are eager to lose weight that we swallow the promises every diet guru on the planet and eagerly plunk down our hard earned cash , praying that this time it will work.

What are the costs of the popular diets ? The initial cost to buy the "Bible" for the diet or join the program . These initial fees range from $ 20 or $ 30 for a book of several hundred dollars for a custom program.Then there's the food . Studies have shown that the average cost of buying food for a week , per person, is

slightly above $ 50. To start the South Beach Diet, tack on an extra $ 25 per week . For the Zone and Weight Watchers diets, the additional cost is about $ 40 , $ 50 for Atkins Intersystem for nearly $ 60 and for Jenny Craig about $ 85 !

Wait a minute , you say. I lose weight by reducing food. Should not save me money ?Looking logically , you would certainly think. But we are not trying to lose weight logically , we approach the whole process through our emotions. It is our emotions that lead us to buy things on impulse, to enroll in programs that we know we will never be finished, and to participate in projects that we will never actively pursue .

Our emotional thinking is our weakness and it has nothing to do with intelligence , education or social level . We are all tricked into scams at some point in our lives and we all suffer in connection with buyer's remorse - it's part of the human experience.

Marketers and ad men know this and spend their days designing things for which we fall too often. How many times have you eagerly dialed 800 during one of those brilliant infomercials only to receive something that does not work as it did on TV, is either shoddily made word just too complicated and you stick it in the back of a cupboard where it gathers dust until you finally throw it away?

When it comes to our weight, our emotions reign supreme. We want desperately to be more attractive , more respected and more desirable . We'll even send us a painful and sometimes dangerous to bring our reality closer to our ideal surgery. And steal our piggy banks, deplete our bank accounts and run up our credit cards for anything that promises us a slender future.

Did we get what we pay ? Sometimes . There are a few successful disciples in every program. It is their pictures and stories that are prominently displayed in promotional literature . This is the old trick and "before" "after" that sucks us in. Our logic ( and a note ) says that the results presented are not typical .Beware the left side of our brain wonders if a little airbrushing was used. Then the explosion on the right side , filled with desire , good intentions and an irresistible urge to believe . And we fall back .

Note that we never see or hear about the failures , hundreds of thousands of people who start a diet with such high hopes yet live the rest of their lives overweight. All diets have their failures but never bother to mention exactly what their percentages are . They may warn that their program must be followed to the letter if it is working, but we must be realistic. How many of us can follow a flawless routine for weeks , months or years it will take to achieve our ideal weight? We can be creatures of habit , but life is rarely part of a unsuitable box for very long. We adapt the routine to meet our immediate needs and everything collapses .Sadder , wiser , guilt and self -criticism, we are committed to again until, finally , we leave . Is there a better way?

We can start by realizing that it is not really important what system we choose. The secret is to respond to our emotions, that infatuation with food that has , nationally , reached crisis proportions . We need to break our deal with what we eat and restore food to its rightful place - something that keeps us alive and healthy, not our primary source of excitement and self - satisfaction.