Stop Dieting, It Makes You Fat!

When you hear the word 'diet', what does that mean to you?

For most people it means giving up foods they love to eat. Denying yourself that delicious dessert. Fighting cravings. Counting calories. Lets face it, for most, dieting is a battle. It's also the single biggest mistake you can make if you want to reach and maintain a stable weight. Let me say that again. If your goal is achieve a healthy, stable weight, then...

DIETING IS THE WORST MISTAKE YOU CAN MAKE!

If you want to lose some weight in a short space of time, then rapidly gain it all back, with interest, then go ahead and keep dieting. And when you go on the next diet, and lose weight, you may think to yourself 'What was Mal talking about?' Then you stop that diet and resume your same old eating habits and before you know it, you're heavier than you've ever been. Then comes the guilt and possibly the comfort eating (after all, I lost weight, so the dieting worked, right? that means it must be MY fault it all piled on again, right?)

So here's how it works. The human body is an amazing thing; it will adapt to pretty much anything we throw at it (within reason). Say I'm in the habit of eating of eating a certain amount of food every day, lets say 2,500 calories worth. My body gets used to that. It expects to get roughly that amount every day. Then I go on a diet of say, 2,000 calories per day. Thats fine at first; the weight starts dropping off. then 1 of 2 things happens;
a). I reach my goal, I've lost so many pounds, or the event I wanted to lose weight for has arrived and I stop the diet, and resume my normal eating habits, 2,500/day
or more likely...
b). I reach a point of diminishing returns, where it's taking longer and getting harder to lose any more weight, my energy levels are way down and I say to hell with it, I've lost enough, and I'm sick of denying, counting and battling! Time to go back to normal eating, 2,500/day

Unfortunately, because my body thinks there may be another famine on the way, it starts laying down as much fat as possible. Also, because I've adapted to living on less fuel/calories, my metabolism has slowed right down, making it harder for me to burn fat.

Think of fat as money. During times of plenty we might save a little, but we just burn on through it for the most part. When it's scarce though, we spend as little as we can, & the reserves still go down. As soon as we hit another good patch you can be sure we'll be saving every cent, making sure to fill those reserves as much as possible. Calories are our bodies currency.

There is a lot of stuff going on in the body as a response to calorie restriction, but unless you want to hear lots of talk about lean body mass, micronutrients, macronutrient ratios and endocrine responses, I'll leave it with the cash analogy for now.

We've established dieting isn't the answer for weight management. So what is? I'm afraid it's nothing fancy or copyrightable, and there is no instant fix that will work for everyone. There will never be a media scrum to be the first to cover the story, because it's not glamorous or sensational.

The 3 T's Essential for weight management