The Sneaky Psychological Reason Your Diets Never Seem to Work — and What to Do Instead

Losing weight isn't easy, so there's nothing more frustrating than seeing your hard work go to waste. If your diet hasn't been paying off, Dr. Carolyn Mein at YourTango explains how your brain could be causing your body to fight back.

This is why your diets seem to always fail.

Weight loss can make you feel good and is an important part of your fitness and daily happiness. But if it's an enormous struggle for you to lose weight, or you always seem to gain all the pounds back (and more!) despite your restrictive diet, there's a simple scientific reason: You're sabotageing yourself with crash dieting.

So what gives? And what's the best way to lose weight?

If you're like many people who diet frequently, you've tried all the fad diets; you've done the ones that people swear by, like the Keto diet, or the Paleo diet. Atkins diet? Yep. Weight Watchers? Probably! You might even have tried that one diet period where you could only eat cabbage soup, and it took you years to be able to even look at cabbage again without feeling queasy. But there's a reason why you can't shed that weight, or that you gain it back when you're done dieting.

According to clinical nutritionist Carolyn Mein, many diets are actually a form of starvation that end up with your stomach signaling your brain that it is starving. Your stomach is super dramatic, but it's this over-the-top urge that has kept animals alive since the beginning of time. Unfortunately, your brain winds up taking this information quite literally.

Your brain's way of interpreting this "starvation" signal is to shut everything down and actually hold onto fat because your body is now convinced that death is imminent and there's a food scarcity.

Because your body is now firmly in the mindset that it must retain food, when you stop dieting and start eating again, it's completely unwilling to let go of any fat that it might have sloughed off before, and then goes about the process of hoarding any new fat in case you go through another period of "famine."

Not only does this mean that you'll gain back the weight you lost, it means that your body will also attempt to hold onto more fat, which explains how you started that diet six months ago a size seven, and now you're an eight.

And the worst part of this starvation mindset, said Mein? The more you do these crash diets, the harder it will be for your body to stop thinking that you're constantly going through periods of starvation, and the harder it will be to lose weight in the future.

On top of that, the most common dieting plan, which is to restrict your fat intake, actually puts a lot of stress on your gallbladder.

Low-fat diets are not great for a couple of reasons. It means if you're not digesting fat, then you're not digesting proteins or carbohydrates, either. And, she said, this is one of the reasons that people who frequently diet end are more likely to have gallbladder issues.

All of this can seem overwhelming when you're trying to lose weight, so what can you do to make things easier on yourself and keep your body from thinking that you're constantly trying to starve it?One of the ways, according to Mein, is to practice modified fasting about once a week, for anywhere from 1-3 days at a time. While an intermittent fasting diet entails avoiding food entirely for a set periods of time, a modified fasting diet allows you to eat mostly fruits and vegetables, which will keep your body from going Romeo and Juliet and deciding that you're dying.

But the most important thing, she said, is to learn to listen to your body and find out what it needs, versus what you're craving. Instead of going for ice cream when you're craving something cold and sweet, you can try frozen/refrigerated fruit instead. Or perhaps if you want a hamburger, try eating some jerky.

Simple modifications to your diet can help keep you from being stuck in an endless dieting loop and help you lose weight and keep it off. For more helpful tips on how you can choose a diet based on your specific body type, watch the YourTango Expert video above.

Dr. Carolyn L. Mein is a chiropractic physician with an active practice in Rancho Santa Fe, CA who developed the 25-body type system as a way to help her patients attain and maintain their ideal weight and energy levels by eating the foods that best support their bodies.

Check out these other great stories from YourTango:

• 10 Genius Weight-Loss Tricks — No Gym Time or Diet Required!
• How to Enjoy Delicious Indulgences Without Killing Your Entire Diet
• 6 Reasons Diets Will Only Make You Fatter (and What to Do Instead)