(Why) are people really disappointed to hear they can eat anything they want and still lose weight?

I don't get it, either. People just don't want to believe that it doesn't have to be hard or miserable!

Because eating "whatever you want" to them might mean eating 12 pizza slices and tons of mac and cheese regularly. Sure you can have pizza and mac and cheese just not that much.

And to the poster above about it being "that easy" it really is NOT easy at all. It's simple CICO sure, but it is not easy to lose weight by any stretch of the imagination.

blankiefinder wrote: »

I've known people who were in denial about how many calories they were eating. 'It's not fair I'm fat, I don't eat anything!". Accepting that it really comes down to calories would mean admitting that they really didn't live on a single slice of lettuce, that it might have been hitting McDonald's every night on the way home from work for a couple burgers, fries, shake and a couple apple pies. (In this instance, not referring to anyone else!)

I think this is a big part of it. For a lot of people, especially women, there's a real stigma, at least in their own minds, to overeating. It's much easier and (they think) more socially acceptable to claim that they ate very little but still got fat, and if that's so it has to be the fault of the food--bad food choices must make you fat, since it can't be excess calories. (They may even really believe this--I finally broke down and watched that Secret Eaters show, and the episode I saw certainly fit into this pattern, but so have MANY conversations I've had with women who struggle with their weight.)

Even for those women (and men, I'm sure) who admit that they overeat, many will still feel like they need to find an excuse for it, because acknowledging that they are (in their own minds, again) being gluttonous is uncomfortable or unacceptable. So we get to the "oh, for ME, if I eat whatever I CANNOT stop." This also, as was pointed out above, provides a built in "it's too hard" excuse, since most people eat, say, bread and pasta, so if you are someone who supposedly can't lose weight without giving those things up, then you would have to do something too extreme to really be expected of you, at least not now.

And, of course, because humans are crazy complicated creatures, these messed up ideas tend to often cause cycles of emotional attachment plus guilt and shame connected with eating choices that actually probably result in the creation of many of the psychological issues with food that people have that DO make it hard for them to eat whatever and still lose weight.

Finally, it's not strictly true that people can just eat what they've been eating (in smaller quantities) and lose weight. Some can, some will naturally and practically get how they have to adjust their diet to make it work with fewer calories (this was me, I think), but some don't have any kind of set eating schedule or plan and think they just eat when they are hungry or what's available without choice and are overwhelmed by the whole thing. For some of them eating less means being very stressed and hungry, whereas getting excited about some new thing (eating healthy, IMO, being a better way to frame it than "dumping the BAD foods like all the WHITE ones" or "eating clean, which I define to mean excluding fatty meats, no matter where from, and home baked bread, but processed cold cuts are fine since they aren't really processed according to my personal non-coherent definition" but then that's just my pet peeve).

kommodevaran wrote: »

For me, it was just so liberating and empowering to know that I could do it by myself.

Not to be a wet blanket, but until someone actually reaches goal weight and successful maintains the weight loss for 5-10 years, they're not really in a position to say that anything in particular "works".

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Need2Exerc1se wrote: »

kristen6350 wrote: »

Because people listen to media. Infomercials, ads in magazines, etc. They assume because of this information that dieting is a struggle and it's a thing you HAVE to do to get weight off.

This, I think, is the truth. And being older, it's something I never realized until I joined MFP. When I grew up, I didn't know anyone that didn't know weight loss was all about eating less calories than you burn. Adults, teens, children, it was just common sense. And maybe that's why the general public was thinner then.

It's truly been an eye opener for me how many people today don't know this. What the heck happened?

I think there's always been a lot of people who didn't know it.

I'm probably about your age, and when I was a kid there were all sorts of fad diets in magazines and stuff like the Scarsdale diet and the Beverly Hills diet (my mother bought the book and lots of diet books, although the only diets I recall her doing were "eating less" based and not faddy). There was also the no fat craze.

I was a senior in high school when the Scarsdale diet was published. I'm not familiar with the Beverly Hills diet.

Mr_Knight wrote: »

kommodevaran wrote: »

For me, it was just so liberating and empowering to know that I could do it by myself.

Not to be a wet blanket, but until someone actually reaches goal weight and successful maintains the weight loss for 5-10 years, they're not really in a position to say that anything in particular "works".

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree. You couldn't say it works for maintenance, but you could say it works for weight loss.

And while it's hard to argue that maintenance is where more people fail, most people I know that have controlled their weight over the years have done it by periodically dieting. They yo-yo. Not 100's of lbs, but I know few people who have not been on more than one "diet" in their life. (I'm kind of old)

I don't know if it's disappointment you're hearing. I think some people (myself included) would find weighing and logging everything they ate to be a bit much. Which is why there are many different ways of going about losing weight. Yes, I know, ultimately it's all about CICO but there are many ways to stay within a goal without all the weighing and measuring. Although eliminating foods is not popular around here, it certainly works well for others. I have happily remained the same weight for many years by just eliminating certain foods. I would rather eat large plates of foods full of vegetables and lean protein rather than monitoring everything I eat just so that I can have a piece of cake. To each his own.

newmeadow wrote: »

Mr_Knight wrote: »

Not to be a wet blanket, but until someone actually reaches goal weight and successful maintains the weight loss for 5-10 years, they're not really in a position to say that anything in particular "works".

This is true. It just is.

It's really not. I'm not sure someone need 10 years to say something worked. That's crazy talk.