An Antidiet Dietitian Shares 5 Reasons Why Diets Suck and Why You Should Ditch Them Forever

"When your body senses restriction, it thinks you are starving. It doesn't matter that you are eating 'healthier,' as many people will say," Soto said. "At an instinctual level, your body senses something isn't right and thinks it's starving." Your body wants to protect you from starving. She explained that this increases cravings and causes bingeing, which makes you overeat, which is why dieting can actually cause weight gain.

When you restrict certain foods like sugar, bread, or chips, you end up thinking about and craving what you can't have. Soto added that your body will also crave what it needs. "I often hear pregnant women say how they crave a juicy steak when iron is low," she said. So if you restrict carbs, for example, you'll crave sugar when your brain and body doesn't have enough.

"Glucose is our main source of energy and your body will increase your cravings to make sure you get it, and it doesn't care what form it comes in, it just needs it," she said. That's how the restrict, crave, binge cycle happens.

People think they're binge eating because they get home from a stressful day and eat a ton of cookies or an entire bag of chips. Soto explained, "More often than not, this is a reaction to restriction." If you haven't eaten enough during the day or you're restricting certain foods, your body is just trying to make up for the lack of energy during the day.

"A primal need to eat kicks in and you go for what is going to give you quick energy (like carbs or sugar), because your body is super smart," Soto said. It wants to protect you against what it perceives as a famine, so it drives you to eat a lot because it's not sure when the next "famine" might be. Often times, binge eating will stop when you give your body enough calories and the foods it wants.

This cycle of restrict, crave, binge is not sustainable. You can't go through life not eating enough calories or giving up the foods you love (hello, birthday cake!). And when you (inevitably) fall off your diet, you think you are the problem, Soto said. The self-hatred of lacking willpower and not being good enough sets in, and encourages a downward spiral of trying again, over and over. But "it's not your fault. It's your body's biological way of keeping you alive," Soto said.

The thoughts of self-hatred and believing you lack willpower can make you feel like a failure and make you feel depressed, like something is wrong with you. Soto added, "Plus the restriction of calories also does a number on your mental health, as shown in the Minnesota starvation study.

The important takeaways to highlight from this study are that after the 'semi-starvation' period of six months where the 36 men ate 1,570 calories per day (3,200 calories a day was normal), the participants reported experiencing depression, apathy, decreased sex drive, decreased strength and stamina, as well as reduced body temperature and heart rate.

They also displayed symptoms of obsession with food: dreaming and fantasizing about food, reading about food, reading cookbooks, talking about food, and savoring their meals with ritual-style eating that prolonged mealtime. This is what dieting does to us!