If you've tried more than one diet in the last coupe of years, you're not alone. Research suggests the average person attempts between 55 and 130 diets in their lifetime. I’m not saying diets don’t lead to weight loss, they usually do. But the results rarely stick. Around 35% of lost weight returns within the first year. By three to five years, 80% or more is back.
So if dieting doesn't work long-term, why do we keep trying?
Diets are designed to be temporary
Diets ask you to follow a strict plan, often with unfamiliar foods, unrealistic restrictions, and a finish line in sight. You set out to make a massive temporary change which fights your physiology. It might work for a few weeks or months. You lose some weight. But eventually, the plan ends and you drop back into the rhythm of your old life. Your physiology fights back, and works hard to get you back to the same weight.
Without understanding how those temporary changes worked — or how to adapt them — your old patterns return. Some people extend diets to add a ‘maintenance phase’ but that just prolongs an energy deficit instead of fixing the root causes of the problem you’re fixing.
Nico works differently. We focus on the daily habits that shape your metabolism, not just the foods on a list.
Diets aren't designed for someone else
Most diets are built on population averages:generic calorie targets, standardised meal plans, one-size-fits-all macros. But your metabolism isn't average, it’s unique.
Research shows that people respond dramatically differently to the same foods. What keeps one person's glucose stable might spike another's into the red. What satisfies one person's hunger might leave another ravenous two hours later.
Diets don't account for this. They assume your body works like everyone else's. When the plan doesn't work for you, when you're hungry, tired, or not losing weight as promised; the diet blames you for not following it correctly. But the problem isn't your compliance. It's that the plan was never built for your specific biology in the first place.
Diets disconnect you from food
Food is more than fuel. It's joy, culture, comfort, and identity. But dieting often turns eating into a source of guilt or self-criticism. You start saying things like "I can't eat that" or "I'm not allowed." Worse, you divide foods into "good" or "bad" categories, giving them moral weight they don't deserve.
This language matters. It reinforces the idea that you're doing something wrong by enjoying food and sets up a cycle where extreme restriction is followed by rebellion.
When the diet ends, you're not just done with the plan. You're done. So you swing back, hard, toward the foods you missed. That's not a failure of willpower. It's the predictable result of a short-term, joyless approach.
Long-term success depends on adjusting your relationship with food. You need to understand what works for you—and you may need to do some hard, emotional work to understand the deeper motivations behind the choices and habits working against you. No matter how hard you try, you can't out-diet buried psychological issues a parent may have helped you embed decades ago.
Your body adapts to the weight it's used to
Your body works hard to protect you constantly. Fat – stored energy – is one of those protective mechanisms. When you gain weight, your system adapts: metabolism, hormones, even hunger signals shift to stabilise at the new weight. Over time, this becomes your set point — a kind of metabolic memory.
When you lose weight, your body resists. It senses a threat to its energy reserves and works to bring you back to that higher set point—by slowing your metabolism, ramping up cravings, and increasing hunger hormones.
It's not sabotage. It's survival.
To keep the weight off, you need to retrain the system, not fight it. You need to "convince" your body to lower that set point and keep it there. That takes consistent action and time — not a constant dieting mindset or blind reliance on willpower.
Diets delay responsibility
When a diet fails, it's easy to blame the plan. And why wouldn't you? It told you exactly what to eat and when. No thinking required. No decisions to make. No understanding needed.
But real change doesn't come from following a list and trusting you’ll get the same results of whatever influencer you’ve chosen to follow this time. It comes from learning how your body works and choosing actions that move you toward your goals. You’ve got to take responsibility for working out what’s going to work long-term for you so you can move beyond thinking about your weight and work towards good health as you age. Doing the work for yourself is, unfortunately, harder than following a convenient plan you can buy into.
Diets give you no feedback
Most diets offer one number: the scale. But your weight is just one piece of the puzzle and it lags behind the real changes happening inside your body.
Your metabolism responds to every meal, every walk, very long period at a desk and every night of sleep. It adjusts constantly. But the scale can't show you what's going on with your glucose, insulin, energy use, or fat storage.
Nico starts with a long-term focus
Nico’s goal is to move your set-point down and keep it where you want it. It’s all about removing the guesswork so you can work on your unique metabolism, living in your individual set of life circumstances.
Diets treat symptoms. Nico works on the system governing your weight.
You use your body's own data to show you how to lose weight and keep it off by changing the way you make decisions that affect your metabolism. One habit at a time, one signal at a time, Nico helps you retrain the metabolism diets ignore.
Because the goal isn't just to lose weight. It's to stop having to lose it again.
References:
Anderson, J. W., Konz, E. C., Frederich, R. C., & Wood, C. L. (2001). Long-term weight-loss maintenance: a meta-analysis of US studies. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 74(5), 579-584.
Mann, T., Tomiyama, A. J., Westling, E., Lew, A. M., Samuels, B., & Chatman, J. (2007). Medicare's search for effective obesity treatments: diets are not the answer. American Psychologist, 62(3), 220-233.
