I've been having a lot of trouble with my dieting recently, and I wanted to start a conversation... basically: What do you hate about diets?

Tbh I hate the fact that I even have to diet at all. I have a horrible habit of making friends with women with naturally high metabolisms or who are very tall and can eat so much before putting on noticeable weight. I hate that I have to concentrate so much on eating like a "normal" person. The "diet" I am trying now is actually the easiest one I've done so far and is not requiring so much effort (I count bites), but I just wish I was able to do it on my own and that I could trust myself to have a natural inclination towards not overeating without having to train myself to do it.
Also, as a lifelong dieter, I am usually pretty good at losing but I have yet to hit a goal weight I set out for myself . I really hope this time will be the lasting change I need.

I don't call what I'm doing a "diet" so much as a "lifestyle change," per se. Still, the things I hate most? 1) Dealing with the cravings for foods my body was accustomed to. It got a lot better after the first month or so, but right now I'm PMSing, and I just want to eat the world. And 2), cooking. I hate cooking. :/

I don't like diets and I never will. I think they can work wonders for some people, but for me I find them restrictive and mentally exhausting to follow. For me I also develop terrible habits with diets too.

Like Keika I see what I'm doing as a lifestyle change. Identifying what food is making me fat and why is the key to my personal success. I need to stay informed on what my body needs and what makes it sluggish/prone to overeating. The worst part about changing your life is just how difficult it is to break those habits. I have to really concentrate on not grabbing chips in the store, or ordering too much food on a night out. It takes time and that's the killer, because we just want to lose this darn weight but it takes a long time to change.

When I get double judged for being overweight and being careful about what I eat. Being overweight gets you automatically judged for not caring about what you eat, but then if someone hears you say, "Oh, I'd rather not have that, I'm trying to watch what I eat," you get judged for being snobby about food or assumed to have an eating disorder. I find that people are more encouraging about losing weight than eating healthy. I wonder if it's because a person who doesn't have weight struggles can say that they don't need to lose weight, but no one can say that they don't need to eat healthy.

Aside from that, the worst thing is that I have to expend so much willpower and planning to stay on track. I tell myself that this will improve once I buy my own food, but I have doubts, to be perfectly honest.

I mostly just hate have to constantly worry about losing enough for the next goal, and then the goal after that comes and it never seems to stop. But um, that's kinda the whole point lol. Anyway, I hate not making goals makes me feel like crap.

I'm doing this approach too

Like many, I have been on every diet under the sun, so I decided that diets don't work
I decided to find out just how many calories I consumed, against how many I burned. Those first few weeks really shocked me, as the realisation of over eating and under exercising hit. Yet.... When I went on a "diet" I would then swap it for under eating in comparison to the workouts. I would never get anywhere, but now I know what I was doing wrong. So I now concentrate on trying to recover my metabolism, after so many years of trying to destroy it .

Before I was eating 1100-1200 calories and burning about 500 calories a day at 323lbs.

Now I am eating 1600 calories and burning 500 - 1000 calories a day at 272lbs.

What I hate about dieting??

1) The pressure and mental goal to lose more than 1lb a week. Now 1lb is 3500 calories! That means that you would need to eat 500 calories less per day than your BMR or and burn 500 calories a day in exercise. For some people, this is quite difficult. But 1 lb a week is amazing progress. I think people put too much pressure on themselves to jump from one to the other too quickly.

2) Specific Diets work for only a portion of people, the amount of people who tell me that I should go join slimming world is ridiculous. They tell me that their auntie so and so lost 100lbs in 4 months, then later I see that auntie to find out they put it all back on and then some, or they lost it so quickly that they take depression meds for the amount of lose skin they have. Those who are successful and happy, usually have to stick to buying the slimming world products, because if they go to eating normal food, they start to put it back on again. For me.... Slimming world does not work, I cannot be aloud to have pasta in any diet except for a rare occasion, I also don't like about 70% of their recipes, I'm a bland girl, call me Miss Beige, but I rarely add spices to anything and I can't eat hot/spicy food. I just eat fresh meat, fresh veggies, fresh potatoes, eggs, rice, the odd sauce, seafood, rice cakes, bananas, Greek yogurt. That's it! But I don't get bored of it, so that means that it is perfect for me, it might not be for everyone, but I count the calories that I eat, and I count the calories that I burn. I teach myself about portions and what is in my food, so that when I hit my goal weight, I will be able to have days where I have accurately been able to judge my food intake without counting or tracking.

I have a friend who went on Slimming World and lost a lot of weight, I think about 5 stone or something? As soon as Christmas came around though she piled a lot of it back on. I don't know numbers exactly, but her social media posts used to be "look at me I lost another 2 pounds #Iloveslimmingworld" and now I never see those posts because she's clearly been derailed! No shame in that, we've all fallen off the wagon, but I think Slimming World tries to stroke the ego of their clients so when they have a weak moment and don't win that certificate for the week it can be damaging to confidence. All the information we need on healthy eating is online, you're essentially paying to talk to people about weight loss, when there are forums like this where you can do it for free!

Exactly Sian! It works as long as you are winning, but then you start to beat yourself up over a plateau, the pre-made meals (weightwatchers) are high in sugar but low in calories. So great! you will lose weight! but you will also lose teeth.

When someone tells me that they are on SW or WW or anything similar, I always hope that they are able to keep in mind that protein in very important, and that they can judge just how much "syn free" or "point free" food is too much.

My goal isnt a one target goal of losing weight, because no one ever wants to go through losing it again. So my goal has always been to lose weight and keep it off. The losing weight will be difficult, but nothing compared to the life long battle of keeping it off.

I, like others have said, am aiming more for a lifestyle change than a "diet".
What I hate about the weight loss process is how complex I have made it for myself. I weigh and measure EVERYTHING. From the sauce I put on my veggie burger, to the milk in my coffee, you name it - I measure it.
I just don't trust myself to accuractly record calories any other way, but it does make preparing even just simple lunch a bit of a chore.

It is boring and annoying but have lost 32lbs so far doing this so it's worth it I guess!

Rach I know that It feels like such a chore just now.... but you will reach a point where you can accurately measure without weighing. Just now you are still teaching yourself to visually estimate. I know know that a handful of spinach is around 35g, I also know that 4 spoonfuls of greek yog in my house is around 125g. The more you lose, and the more calories you get to eat through working out and what not, the less you need to be so exact with calorie intake. You will get to that point, don't worry about it.

I have tried medifast and 1200 calorie diets which I found way to restricting. I hated it. Now I just started doing more of a lifestyle change. Instead of 1200 calories, I've gone up to 1450 and added exercise that I enjoy. I just started so we'll see if it works. I'm not hungry, I don't feel deprived. I love it!

That it almost causes me to be more self conscious about eating.

I hate having to diet in general. Especially when there's a calorie limit. Myfitnesspal tells me I need 1200 cals to reach my goal

When I'm starting the day, I worry about how much I've eaten and if I'm under my calorie limit.
During the day I'm hungry.
By the end of the day I'm guilty that I'm over my calorie limit

Does anyone ever feel that way too?