What to Do After Your Fad Diet Fails - Lifehacker

Diets tend to fail, and the ones that promise quick weight loss through following one weird trick are especially doomed to failure.

Every fad diet comes with an explanation of why it’s the best diet for you and why it will succeed where all the other diets failed.

Fad diets promise, and often achieve, quicker weight loss than regular old healthy eating.

The scale fluctuates from day to day, and it’s not just about fat gain or loss.

If you’re eating a lot of carbs, you’ll have more glycogen and water in your muscles; if you go on a low carb diet, you’ll lose weight from that glycogen (carb) storage.

If you lost five pounds in the first week or two on your crash diet, chances are that very little of it was actually fat—and you aren’t reversing your progress if at some point you gain it back.

Muscle is important to overall health as well as to allow you to exercise, so after your diet ends or fails, it’s actually healthy to gain that muscle back if you lost too much.

On the other hand, you probably built some bad habits on the crash diet, too.

Eating healthy may be less exciting than crashing and burning on a fad diet, but you’ll be happier and healthier in the long run.

With so many diet gurus promising transformations without getting up off ones ass and in fact many online groups actively demonizing exercise as bad, we’re moving further and further from what actually works.

As activity has been cut, weight has been gained, and the diet gurus are just gaining in power and influence.