On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
> "Dieting" may have no lasting effect on weight, because for whatever
> reason, people often go back to overeating.
Actually I think you just hit it on the head there. The concept "diet" is almost universally considered to be something with a beginning and end: you do it until you lose weight. But the only way to keep the weight off is to diet for the rest of your life -- to follow the weight-loss diet with a weight maintenance diet that never ends.
Under current ideas and connotations, I think 99% of us consider the idea of a permanent diet an appalling idea. But that explains the lack of diet success in a nutshell. Temporary diets -- which is what we mean by diets -- necessarily only lead to temporary weight loss. There's no mystery to be explained.
Michael