Know Your Avatar

Most popular diet books and weight loss programs are designed with what marketers call an "avatar" in mind. This is the category of person the product is designed for. Trendy diet books and weight loss plans advertised on TV are aimed at one avatar: sedentary women.

Are you a middle-class housewife with 2.3 kids in your 30s or 40s who thinks working out means going for a walk around the block with your gal pals? No? Then why are you dieting like a yogurt commercial mommy?

Think Muscle, Not Just Scale Weight

Layperson diets are designed to meet a layperson's goal: smaller numbers on the scale. Even men have succumbed to body weight obsession, many oblivious to the ideas of body composition and muscle catabolism.

"Hey, I lost 10 pounds!" Yeah, you lost 5 pounds of fat, 3 pounds of muscle, and 2 pounds of water. Congrats, you're smaller, weaker, you're producing less testosterone, and your metabolism sucks a little more now. You've just gender-reassigned yourself without having to inject estrogen or chop off any of your tender bits. Good job on the weight loss. Now go watch The View.

Unless you're grossly obese and just trying to not die within a year, your diet goals probably exceed the capacity of the pop diet's abilities. You want less fat, but also want more muscle, more strength, and more athletic ability. None of these can be delivered by the frozen dinner nutrition plan your mom uses or the latest mass market diet book.

Choose a Better Plan

If you need to follow a diet plan to get back on track, make sure it was designed with your "avatar" in mind: a gym-going dude who cares more about looking great and performing well than the ambiguous numbers on a scale.

Make sure it takes into account that you want to build muscle and be strong. Hint: Such a diet plan is probably not advertised by a D-list celebrity and does not have a title like "Kale Detox: Tone Your Tummy in Two Days!" This very site is jam-packed with better options. Check out The Simple Diet for Athletes or The Velocity Diet®.