You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘it was too good to be true’ and nowhere is this truer than when it comes to dieting. If you’ve been on and off diets, losing weight only to gain it back, you know how frustrating it can be. In systems thinking we call this — fixes that fail. It’s when a solution seems to work in the short term but ends up making things worse in the long run. Sound familiar?
Quick Fix Dieting
Everywhere we look, dieting is promoted as the obvious answer to weight loss. Eat less, move more. It’s simple, right? And at first, it does work. You start cutting calories, cutting out entire food groups, or maybe only eating between certain hours. You see progress and that reinforces that a diet was the right choice.
But here’s the kicker. Diets focus on the symptom — your weight— ignoring the underlying system that generated the weight problem in the first place. The eating system that determines your food choices and eating patterns remains unchanged.
Weight Regain - why diets don't work
Weight recycling isn’t about a lack of willpower or motivation—it’s a systems response. On the biology side when you restrict calories, your metabolism slows down, and hormones that make you feel hungry, like ghrelin, ramp up. Once the diet ends, your body is primed to regain that weight, sometimes even adding more.
An Unknown Cause - Your Eating System
Diets treat weight as if it’s just a matter of calories in versus calories out, but they ignore all the factors that drive why and how you eat.
Your relationship with food is much more complex than just what’s on your plate. Your eating system is made up of complex interacting rules that have been acquired from your history, cultural influences, and even the environment you live in.
Diets don’t even touch on these factors.
Use A Systems Approach to Break the Cycle
If you want to break the pattern of recycling weight, you need to take a step back and look at the whole system. And that involves unpacking your food choices and eating patterns and discovering what’s really driving them. These are the things that need to be addressed for real, lasting change.
When you stop seeing weight as the problem and dieting as the automatic fix, you open the door to real change. It’s not just about food—your emotions, routines, and environment all play a role in how and why you eat. Once you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, you’ll start to see where the real issues lie. That’s when you can make small but powerful changes that go beyond temporary fixes and lead to lasting results.
Ditch the Short-Term Solutions
Diets might give quick results, but they won’t solve the real issues behind your overeating. Real change happens when you stop chasing the number on the scale and start understanding the system that is driving your relationship with food. To see why diets work until they don't, you can get start with the free tools in our Learning Lab.
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