Believe it or not, despite all the information available about diets, dieting, and weight loss, there are still many falsely held and untested beliefs. The 95% figure comes from one small study of one hundred consecutive patients treated for obesity at a hospital nutrition clinic in 1959. There have been no definitive studies about the number of people who actually fail on diets since then. Exposing myths such as this is important if you are to have the right tools to achieve your weight loss goal.
What counters myths is real knowledge. Real knowledge does not come from what you think is true or what you've heard is true. It comes from study, careful fact finding, weighing the evidence. It comes from a willingness to seek answers that truly fit the circumstances. It comes from questioning your own closely held beliefs that you might treasure, fear, or even hate.
Untested beliefs fill the annals of all fields of study, including medicine, psychology, astronomy, biology, and they are firmly implanted in all walks of life as well - old wives tales, superstitions, gossip. In medicine, for example, physicians once believed that no one would ever be able to operate on the heart.
Can you examine your knowledge about dieting and weight loss to see what myths you are holding on to? What about looking very closely at those unshakable beliefs you might have about your own ability to diet. If you think of yourself as a bad dieter, is this belief based on real facts or just falsely held "truths"?
For example, a belief held by many dieters who go off their diet somewhere along the way, is that they don't have the weight loss motivation it takes. Is this a falsely held belief or is it the truth? Do you find yourself thinking this way, that you don't have enough weight loss motivation? If so, have you examined the facts, the actual facts, not just what you think or what you've heard as true?
Here's one fact: With any change in behavior there are regressive episodes, times when the person changing her behavior reverts to her previous, old behavior. The process of self change cannot be graphed as an unbroken line moving always forward and upward. The overall result is forward and upward, but the actual course of self-change includes dips as well. So to conclude that you don't have the motivation it takes to lose weight because you have slips and lapses, because you fall off your diet at times, is really not a fact. This may be one of those closely held diet or weight loss myths that you really need to let go of.
Are there others?
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