People don’t fail their diets. Their diets fail them.

It’s no big secret that people are looking to lose a little weight – as of this writing, over two-thirds of this country are overweight, and over 25% are actually obese. And there’s certainly no lack of diet and exercise books out there – just check your local bookstore and you might get lost in the jungle of the diet and exercise section. The classic results of any of these programs is so-called “yo-yo” dieting – called that because you drop a little weight at first, then you fall off of the wagon, and then you gain it all back – often with interest accrued. Why does that happen?

Because it’s unnatural.

Your body is a wonderfully, gloriously intricate chunk of biochemical machinery. Like any other kind of machinery, it’s built to work a certain way. You can either work along with the way you’re built to operate, or you can try to work against it.

All of those crazy fad yo-yo diets work against your machinery. Eat nothing but mangoes and oatmeal for three months? Does that sound natural? Of course not. And the whole time, you’ve got to struggle to keep yourself doing that bizarre, unnatural behavior, when your body is screaming the entire time to do something else.

Not surprisingly, that program falls apart as soon as you are mango-ed out. A similar example is a starvation program, where you’re eating only 1200 calories a day or something nutty like that. It’s a program you can’t physically keep up in the long term; it’s just too unnatural to the human body.

More common is a program that is unnatural to you, meaning you as an individual. We’re creatures of habit, habits that are formed over months and years of repetition to form rock-solid neurological patterns that determine our behavior.

Let’s say you are a typical couch potato, sitting on the couch, eating tons of processed foods, junk foods, all that sort of thing. All of a sudden, whammo, some fitness guru expects you to take a 180 degree turn away from a lifestyle you’ve got ingrained into your personality – into your very neurology – and eat nothing but healthy foods, exercise like crazy, and do it day in, day out, every day until the end of time… just like that?

No way. Absolutely no way that will work. There’s no way it can work. Our behavior isn’t a light switch. Our neurology, the patterns that we reinforce on a daily basis, don’t instantly transform into what we desire. It just doesn’t work that way. And to expect it to work that way, is absolute folly.

And yet, we seem to expect the impossible. We expect to fly in the face of the natural laws that make our minds and bodies work, and when we fail – as we inevitably must – we kick ourselves in the butt. What a loser, what a jerk, what a spineless weakling, we call ourselves, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Oh, there’s some fitness gurus out there that would like you to believe that. Iron willpower, they say, that’s the ticket. You must force yourself to do these ridiculously unnatural things through sheer willpower, or you’re a loser and not worth saving.

Rubbish. Willpower fails. It has to. It has to, from a physiological, neurological basis. You simply can’t force your body to do the impossible.

We’re human, folks. We wear out. We get tired. We get stressed. To deny that, is like trying to deny the effects of gravity. Utter foolishness.

And really, people, I hate to put it like this, but… I have a life. So do you, I hope. The vast majority of us on the planet aren’t looking to spend every waking moment either in a gym, weighing out our food by the gram, or fretting about similar such nonsense. We’re busy with our careers, we want to spend time with our families or friends, and we want to pursue any of a number of interests.

So how do we get into the shape we want, while not feeling like we’re killing ourselves doing it? The answer is deceptively simple.

We make it natural.

Okaaaaaaaaaaay, you say, a bit of skepticism creeping into your voice. That’s nice. But what exactly does THAT mean?

Well, for starters, let’s step back and recognize that there are certain natural laws that govern how our bodies work. Just like there are natural laws governing the motion and interaction of celestial bodies like planets and stars – we call it astrophysics – there are laws that govern the day to day operation of your body – called physiology.

Most of the diet and exercise programs out there try to force you to fight against these natural laws of physiology and behavior. It’s like swimming upstream.