In the US, 80% of girls have been on a diet by the time they're 10 years old. In this honest, raw talk, neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt explores the science behind why dieting not only doesn't work but is likely to do more harm than good. She suggests ideas for how to live a less diet-obsessed life, intuitively.

Many statistical types of research found a fact that people keep dieting, no matter what they tried, the weight they did lose always came back. Why is this so hard? “Obviously, how much weight depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn. What most people don’t realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness” said Sandra.

The human brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, this is called people’s set point, it actually has a range of about 10 or 15 pounds.

“The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it,  to keep your weight stable as conditions change” said by Sandra. And this explains why dieting doesn’t work normally.

And another fact is a temporary weight gain can become permanent. If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal.

Thus, people who keep dieting may lose weight for a short time. However, diets don't have very much reliability. Five years after a diet, most people have regained weight. Forty percent of them have gained even more. If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it.

So how can we break this condition, if we want to lose weight except dieting?

Let’s face it.

“Learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry. 

Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. Sit down to regular meals without distractions. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop and let your hunger decide when you should be done.”                - Sandra Aamodt

Keep health, keep a healthy lifestyle.