With the occurence and awareness of Diabetes on the rise, more and more overweight people are looking for solutions to their health issues. With the proven link between excess weight and diabetes growing, more and more people are looking for a longer term solution. In the following days I want to show why healthy eating is a much better solution to weight loss and diabetes than ‘going on a diet’.
‘Going on a diet’ is a common way to try to lose weight, but after the diet finishes the weight just creeps back on again… and sometimes even more. So changing from ‘going on a diet’ to ‘healthy eating’ is the way to ensure long-term success in weight loss. Why diets are so popular is that they promise great results in a short time…. they often are the ‘key’ to dramatic weight loss, or the latest ‘proven’ way to lose weight. And people are taken in by the hype so they try the diet, lose some weight (never as much as all the fanfare suggests) but then put the weight back on again. And these ‘fad’ diets appeal to us because the seem like a quick fix to a long term problem that is excess weight.
Why don’t fad diets work in the long term? Some of them do result in weight loss in the short term, because many of them recommend a very low kilojoule intake or radical changes to our eating habits. But once we go off the diet, the weight just comes back on. Also, diets that are too low in kilojoules or in certain nutrients can cause dizziness, poor concentration and constant hunger. This means they aren’t healthy as they are starving our bodies of the required nutrients and so we can’t stay on them for too long.
What we are trying to do is lose fat, but most of these types of weight loss programs cause us to lose body fluid, muscle mass or stores of carbohydrates and not a loss of fat at all. So our weight does go down. As soon as we go back to normal eating we quickly replenish our fluids and carbohydrates stores, resulting in weight gain. So we think that eating normally makes us fat, when in reality we haven’t lost any fat at all. This causes us to repeat the cycle over and over which is not good for our health.
In my next post I will discuss healthy eating in more detail. In the meantime, if you want to read more, look here.
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