Overeating and being overweight is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.  Diets and weight loss products do not perform miracles.  Being overweight has psychological components that need to be addressed before one can successfully lose weight and keep it off.  A diet may take away the overeating for a while, but it leaves the underlying causes of overeating unaddressed.  Hence, the yo-yo syndrome of losing and gaining the same 10 lbs over and over again, endlessly.  As a result dieting increases compulsive eating and your weight.  Most people find that they gained more weight than they had lost when they started a diet program.  Dieting ends up becoming one of the causes of obesity and eating disorders.

The term 'dieting' refers to all extreme measures of weight loss, this includes fad diets, reducing caloric intake to 1000 calories a day or less, excessive exercising, using appetite suppressants, diuretics, laxatives to aid weight loss.

Dieting is a waste of time and energy.  Dieters spend all of their time thinking about food and food restrictions instead of life experiences.  Food restriction and deprivation eventually makes one resent the diet they are on, and it is the most common reason that people give up dieting.  Most habitual dieters experience depression, nervousness, lethargy or irritability.  Most restrictive diets exclude favorite foods, when one has a craving for that food, most people end up consuming more calories in the effort to avoid that particular food, than if they had included that food in their diet.

Counting calories, thinking about what we can’t eat, and thinking about when, where, and how we can eat is obsessive.  Dieting has a tendency to focus on food and the human mind tends to get what it focuses on.  If you walk around all day thinking about food, it’s going to be very difficult not to eat.  If your attention is directed towards food, that is where your energy will go. To lose weight you must take your mind off of food. Begin placing more of your attention on understanding, pleasure, mental health, self-satisfaction, and positive feelings.

Unless you create the diet yourself for your particular needs, you are using a food plan some authority devised.  With dieting, people get totally dependent on living by someone else’s rules.  This implies that you do not know what is best for your body and that you cannot trust your body to tell you when to eat and how much to eat.  One step to staying slim is to take responsibility for our own bodies instead of buying totally into someone else’s ideas.

Each diet tells you which foods you can eat and which you can’t. The implication is that there are “good” foods and “bad” foods. Depending on the individual diet, foods such as carrots, watermelon or bananas can be either good or bad.  It is human nature to want what is forbidden, so dieting for very long seems to out of the question.

A deprived body brings about abnormal food cravings for large amounts of high-fat and/or high-sugar and high-carbohydrate foods.  Many women report dieting "successfully" and then suddenly, they binge. It may be triggered by exposure to too much food, feeling bad, feeling good, stress or boredom.  Somehow dieting turns off the switch that stops us from overeating.

Our hearts and spirits are longing for us to heal our deeper feelings of sadness, loneliness, frustration, and pain. Our inner selves know that dieting is not the solution. The irony is that natural weight, real beauty, vitality, health, and energy can be reached only through honest self-awareness and self-acceptance. When we listen to the complexities of ourselves as a whole person, we begin to care for ourselves with compassion, self-reflection, and self-nurturing. Developing new ways to be in touch with one’s feelings and to communicate these desires also eliminates the need to use food or weight to cope with our problems. It is only through a genuine relationship with ourselves and food that we achieve a healthy body, a healthy life, happiness, energy, and peace with food.