I Can't Afford to Lose Weight, Therefore I'm on a Diet

I Can't Afford to Lose Weight, Therefore I'm on a Diet

To lose weight, we are so desperate that we believe the claims of every diet expert on the world and happily part with our hard-earned money in the hopes of finding anything that works this time around.

What are the financial implications of trendy diets? The first expense of the diet is the purchase of the "Bible" for the diet or participation in the program. Fees for the first time might vary anywhere from $20 or $30 for a book to several hundred dollars for a bespoke program or consultation.

Then there's the matter of the food. According to studies, the average cost of a week's worth of food purchases for a single person is little more than $50 on average. To begin the South Beach Diet, add an extra $25 per week to your budget. The extra expense for the Zone and Weight Watchers diets is around $40, for Atkins it is $50, for NutriSystems it is over $60, and for Jenny Craig, it is approximately $85!

You pause for a moment, you say. I'm losing weight by restricting my caloric intake. Isn't it true that this should save me money?

If you look at it rationally, you would undoubtedly conclude that this is the case. However, we do not approach the process of losing weight analytically; rather, we approach it through the lens of our emotions. It is our emotions that encourage us to make impulsive purchases, to enroll in programs we know we will never finish, and to get involved in initiatives we will never fully participate in.

Our emotional thinking is a weakness, and it has nothing to do with our intellect, education, or social standing, among other things. We've all been duped by a scam at some time in our lives, and we've all had some kind of buyer's remorse at some point in our lives - it's just a part of the human experience.

Marketers and advertising professionals are fully aware of this, and they spend their days developing tactics into which we all too often fall. As a result, how many times have you eagerly dialed an 800 number during one of those brilliant infomercials only to receive something that doesn't work as well as advertised, is either shoddily made or simply too complicated, and you end up putting it in the back of a cupboard where it collects dust until you finally throw it out?

When it comes to our weight, our emotions take precedence over all other considerations. Having greater attractiveness, respectability, and desirableness are all things we passionately desire. We will even go to the extent of undergoing painful and even risky surgery in order to make our reality closer to our ideal. As a result, we will raid our piggy banks, exhaust our bank accounts, and max out our credit cards in order to get anything that promises us a bleak future.

Is what we pay for what we get? Sometimes. In every program, there are a few disciples who are successful. They are the ones whose photographs and tales are widely included in promotional brochures. The traditional "before" and "after" ploy is what gets us in this situation. Our thinking (as well as a little footnote) informs us that the findings shown here are not typical.

The suspicious left hemisphere of our brain wonders whether a little Photoshopping was done to make the image seem more appealing. The right side of the brain then expands, bursting with desire, well-intentioned motives, and an overpowering want to believe. And again, we fall for it.

It's important to note that we never hear or see about the failures, the hundreds of thousands of people who start a diet with such great expectations and then end up being overweight for the rest of their life. All of the diets have had their share of failures, but none of them care to tell how many percent of their participants failed. They may warn that their program must be followed to the letter if it is to be effective, but let's be realistic about this. How many of us are able to stick to a strict program for the weeks, months, or years it will take to attain our goal weight without being distracted? We may be creatures of habit, but life seldom fits neatly into a single, impenetrable box for an extended period of time. We modify our daily schedule to satisfy our current requirements, and everything comes crashing down.

Angrier, wiser, guilt-ridden, and self-critical, we resolve to start again until we finally give up and stop trying. Is there a better way to do things?

We may begin by acknowledging that it doesn't really matter whatever diet we follow. In order to succeed, we must handle our emotions, namely our obsession with food, which has reached crisis proportions in the United States. We must end our love affair with food and return food to its proper position in our lives – as something that keeps us alive and healthy rather than as our major source of pleasure and self-satisfaction.

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