I think about this a lot too.

The proven, from what I understand is that commercial diets, extreme diets, eliminating food group type diets, or really any sort of magical thinking diet really isn't sustainable in the long run for most people. Despite going down the diet rabbit hole myself several times, that's, intellectually at least, the easy part to understand.

But the kicker, for us who overeat is, that if we think about it, we're not fat because of an absence of weight watchers or *insert whatever plan here* , but because we don't live moderately with regards to how we eat or exercise.

Most people who are slim all of their adult lives don't diet, but they do have rules of behaviour around food and exercise that they adopted early in life and fine tune as life demands. They seem to just stay slim effortlessly because
they've been doing these things for so long they just do them automatically, without a great deal of thought.

So my question to myself is, why can I no longer just eat and exercise normally, and allow the weight to come off slowly? And slowly it will come off. I have lost 70lbs before, and I ate sanely, and exercised daily for 3 months before I lost a single pound. Meds will do that do you..but I did lose weight and I did keep it off for 5 years.

But then of course life got really stressful, and there was a lot of awful stuff,
and emotional eating, comfort eating, and eating because "it's the only damn good thing in my life" all came back.

So why don't I just return to doing what I did before? Why have I become so intolerant of sitting with uncomfortable feelings?

Most diets are pretty stupid. But eating sanely and getting a bit of exercise each day isn't. So why don't we do that?

This is what I'm trying to address in myself - the psychological side, the emotional side, the addictive behaviour part, when I have the attention span to read what psychologist have to say about it all...but often I read the same paragraph over and over again, the wander off and eat a few cookies, because what the expert has to say might convince me to give up some of the self-destructive thoughts and behaviours I still cling to.