People complain all the time about dieting. They need to know the latest study on it so that they can slim down in time for the holidays or the wedding or the baby shower or whatever event they are attending that leads to huge displays of vanity. But what if I told you their attempts at becoming Brad Pitt or Adele are, unfortunately, in vain. I suppose that could be expected from vanity, but enough with the similar sounding words, let's get down to the facts. "Thinking that one is following a low-calorie diet might facilitate weight loss, a new preliminary Frontiers in Psychiatry study finds. The placebo effect of the imaginary low-calorie diet was  found to be sufficient for study participants to lose weight while  following the same diet did not result in any significant results for  participants believing they followed a balanced diet" (psypost). In other words, all of those lose weight quick popular diets may just be inducing the placebo effect on people. But what is the placebo effect exactly and why is it so powerful? Further, how the hell does it work anyway? Well, the mechanisms for the placebo effect are far more complex than just keeping a positive attitude about treatment or popping a sugar pill every time you want to lose a few pounds. In fact, attitude may have nothing to do with it at all. It does, however, have everything to do with the brain. 

"How placebos work is still not quite understood, but it involves a  complex neurobiological reaction that includes everything from increases  in feel-good neurotransmitters, like endorphins and dopamine, to  greater activity in certain brain regions linked to moods, emotional  reactions, and self-awareness. All of it can have therapeutic benefit.  "The placebo effect is a way for your brain to tell the body what it  needs to feel better," says Kaptchuk. But placebos are not all about releasing brainpower. You also need  the ritual of treatment. "When you look at these studies that compare  drugs with placebos, there is the entire environmental and ritual factor  at work," says Kaptchuk. "You have to go to a clinic at certain times  and be examined by medical professionals in white coats. You receive all  kinds of exotic pills and undergo strange procedures. All this can have  a profound impact on how the body perceives symptoms because you feel  you are getting attention and care" (health.harvard.edu). So this is much more complex than any of that positive thinking nonsense, which has been demonstrated several times to not work. You cannot just keep a positive outlook and be healed. There must be some very specific sort of ritual involving treatment: the doctors in lab coats, the generic pills, the constant surveillance by trained professionals. All of this working in tandem with feel good neurochemicals in the brain may actually cause you to lose weight, but it does not help you keep it off. This placebo effect also explains why some people cannot keep the weight off after they lose it. They either give up on the rituals that reassured their brain that weight loss was possible or simply stopped taking those rituals so seriously, and everyone stops eventually. Once they stop taking the treatment seriously, then the positive benefits tend to fade. "The maximal effect of  placebo, approximately 40% reduction in symptom scores, is likely to be  achieved within the first four to six months. After this, the placebo effect stabilizes and gradually wears off but is still present following 12 months of treatment" Gee, sure sounds like the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of a lot of diet plans, eh? So, high carb, low carb, paleo, vegetarian, or vegan? Which placebo will you choose to lose weight only to put it back on again after a few months?