Crazy diets rarely work: Jason... a case study

I have said for a long time now that crazy, day-altering diets rarely, if ever, work. Now I am not talking about someone completely eliminating processed sugar or trying to get more vegetables into their daily consumption, I am talking about fasting, water-fasting, and even keto. I know a lot of people that have tried all of these things rather than making gradual changes to their overall diet until it becomes a healthier lifestyle and all of them have eventually returned to their previous unhealthy way of eating. It is a question of "when" not "if."

Today I want to focus on someone I know and we'll just call him "Jason" because that is his name. I'm not going to feature pictures or dox Jason, he's just a face in a very long line of many people that I believe have fallen into this trap of taking what they are told are shortcuts by people on social media.

Are they shortcuts? Yeah, of course they are but all of these shortcuts do not make permanent life changes for him or anyone else and therefore they are built to fail from the offset.

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Jason is a really nice guy. Jason is also probably around 100 lbs overweight. He has movement limitations because of this and I don't think he could run a couple hundred meters without injuring himself. Jason owns a restaurant and I think he has partook in a lot of the shop's offerings for many years. Jason also drinks quite a lot of a beer on a regular basis.

Jason recently decided to give up alcohol in an effort to lose weight. Jason was very vocal about this every time we would hang out but as I predicted the very first time he told me about this, he didn't stick with this program for very long. It was about a month.

After that month I would see Jason out drinking MORE frequently than I did before he ever started the purging of alcohol from his life and as predicted, any weight loss that Jason experienced from a month of abstinence, has all come back.

After that Jason apparently started looking for other ways that could help him lose weight and he came across intermittent fasting. He probably searched around YouTube or something similar until he found a program that the thought he could stick with or barring that, whatever sounded easiest.

He is not on a program that has informed him that he can eat whatever he wants from noon until 6pm but outside of that window he is not meant to consume anything except water. He tells everyone about this whenever we are around him during those hours. He has turned this "diet" into an excuse to eat and drink things the he knows damn well are the exact things that you really shouldn't ever eat.... and he does it in great quantities.

I don't know what the science behind fasting is but if the idea is to achieve the ONLY thing that actually can help someone lose weight - a daily caloric deficit - this plan is completely ridiculous because it's failure is a mathematical certainty. If someone allows themselves to be a complete glutton for 6 hours of the day they are going to do exactly that, especially when they have been told that there are no repercussions for having done so. Jason wholeheartedly believes that he can consume 5000 calories during those 6 hours, do no exercise, and provided he does nothing but drink water for the rest of it, that the weight is just going to fall off of his body.

This, of course, has not happened and also when Jason gets drunk before 6 it is not uncommon to see him out still drinking past his allotted eating and drinking times.

He is one of the people that I know that talks about diets the most even though he is not someone that if you were to just look at him, that you would believe that he has any idea what he is talking about. He doesn't know what he is talking about and he isn't seeing any results. When he does talk about his diet he is adamant about the success of other people that he has heard about on various clips he has watched, and because of these clips he truly believes that it is only a matter of time before he experiences the same results.

If he is on this "diet" for another month I would be surprised because honestly, if you are doing any sort of diet that results in a caloric deficit, almost anyone should start to see results in the first week.

I believe that influencers and content-creators out there feel this pressure to come up with new and exciting weight loss tactics and by catering it to a lazy audience like Jason, they are always going to find new victims. The fact that there are no real people out there that have seen results from this sort of thing is rather meaningless because the hapless victims so desperately want it to be true that they seek out information to confirm their bias and don't really pay much attention to the other aspects of the subject's life such as the fact that they are MMA fighters and burn several thousand calories every day from exercise. Jason on the other hand rarely moves fast enough that anything other that flip-flops would ever be necessary in his life.

I say all the time that other than liposuction, there are no shortcuts to fat loss for anyone. All the celebrities and influencers that suggest otherwise are almost certainly lying to you for the sake of their own financial profit. I have not seen the specific things that Jason is watching but I would bet the farm that these people sell supplements that you are meant to take during your fasting portions of the day.

A person looking to lose weight and keep it off needs to make small and gradual changes to their own lifestyle. They don't need to cut out ALL food or ALL drink but instead make minor adjustments to their bad habits over time and preferably, replace them with good ones. In my mind and the mind of any trainer that is being honest, this is basically the only way to accomplish long term weight loss.

I feel bad for Jason because I know he is going to fail and in all likelihood he is going to end up even fatter than he was before he started this very silly diet that he is doing now. I hope that one day he will let me have a talk with him about making permanent changes to one's diet and exercise plan- which i believe always has been and always will be the only way that one can permanently change their size.

_{I made mistakes in my life. I became fat in my 30's. I turned it all around by making realistic and gradual changes to my life and I am now as strong as I have ever been in my life in my 40's. It really isn't as difficult as it sounds but you have to ignore the hype and stick to fundamentals}