Failed Diets and What Happened: #2 The Diet Food Diet

Bad choices happen when you're busy and exhausted at the same time. That's what got me on to just buying a bunch of diet meals and going with that.

• Diet name: The Diet Food Diet
• Who put me on it: My silly self
• How it's supposed to work: It's allegedly made by professional nutritionists, they have to know the right things to eat... don't they?
• Length of time I kept to it: About a month.
• How I fared on this fare:

My first thought was how easy everything was. I could pick a packet from the freezer, nuke if necessary (because I got a lot of desserts), and eat it. My second thought was how tiny the portion sizes were. I was easily unsatisfied after every meal, and for the first week, I was hitting the desserts pretty hard.

I taught myself to eat slowly, so I could feel fuller sooner, and not get into the desserts so much. Because it's desserts that are evil, of course. Plus whatever artificial sugars they had in my sweet treats gave me... digestive issues. I flipped between Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine, and whatever knock-off diet food was cheapest at the time.

Of course, I preferred the diet food that tasted like Real Food(tm), so I went for the stuff that gave the best flavours.

What I learned, at the end of the month, is that diet food is not good for you. Shocker. If they remove the fat, they load it with sugar to make it taste good. If they extract the sugar, they load it with fat. And there is no escaping the carbohydrates in pre-packaged diet food.

• The Exception: I clung to my chocolate ration like a dog with a bone.
• The Failure Point: M-O-N-E-Y. We hit a rough patch. I quit the expensive, half-size meals and did a whole bunch of stews and such to stretch what we had until I hit the breaking point. Diet food was too expensive to sustain during times of poverty. Turns out I lost just as much weight by eating stews all day as I did on pathetically tiny diet meals.
• End Result: Diarrhoea, depression, anxiety spikes, and a continuing lack of energy.
• Retrospect Analysis:

The Diet Industry never makes money out of the successes. They use them as advertising, true, but the real money comes from schmucks like past-me who literally buy into that noise. The diet industry has no interest in people being healthy. Therefore, they cram all of their "diet" products with as much of the bad stuff as they can get away with, make the meals tiny, and set their customers up for a cycle of failure.

Plus they mix fats and carbs.

My next disaster was the "Celiac Diet". Which I hope to cover tomorrow.

(Picture © Can Stock Photo / margouillat)