The diet dilemma

Welcome to  January, the month where everyone begins to panic about the Christmas Obesity that a few weeks over indulgence has brought on and resolves to do something about it. Next month being February, the month where people realize that diets are really fucking hard and most will abandon them.
If you have a diet that sounds like it might work then there's money to be made. If your diet sounds pleasant and is reasonably hassle free then get ready to start counting money. If it does all of the above and actually works then you'll be laughing your way to the bank. The thing is I don't think any of them are actually sustainable because if they were then people would stick with them and the diet book industry would slowly come to a halt. 
I'm pretty certain they are geared to set people up to fail so that they can come back and try again with that diet or maybe another one. I think if there was one or two that actually did what they promised then there wouldn't be such a varied market out there for diet books. 
The blood sugar diet, the paleo diet ( not a weightloss so much as a life style) , the fast diet, the two day diet, 5;2 diet, the celebrity endorsed diet, the juice diet and more. You name it and someone has tailored a diet to suit it. People on the look out are inundated with choice and will often go for the most publicised without even realizing they are just buying into the hype.

All of this being said I have never once bought a diet book. Well that's not entirely true, I did once own a copy of Paul McKennas 'I can make you thin' and actually it wasn't bad. A lot of his advice made sense and I imagine I'd have seen some progress if I had actually stuck with it. He didn't have actual recipes but there was a cd to hypnotize you (which was a bit much) but the book itself had decent tips about only eating when you're hungry, stopping when you are full and not actually forbidding yourself from eating any particular food (because you will only want it more) I wasn't ready or willing so that was abandoned and it was my own real foray into the world of dieting. I have always been too fussy to follow a meal plan set by someone else. If only half of what they suggested was food I was likely to eat then I would only be wasting time and money. 

Nowadays I am not quite as fussy but I find my diet limited for other reasons. Between my candida and my IBS (lucky me) I can't have sugar (or maple syrup, honey, agave, sweetners), gluten or dairy so it doesn't really leave a lot of room for a diet to work it's magic and to be fair when I did gain a few extra pounds it was because I was cheating on my diet and making myself fairly ill in the process because I'm smart like that. Now I am back on the wagon and gradually edging my way back into exercising, one painful workout at a time so I'm sure my christmas belly will go down in time and hopefully this time I'll stick with it even when everyone else is binning their diet books and pretending January never happened.