Diets
I don't know who came up with the concept of dieting, but I have known this phenomenon all my life. In total, people spend billions on dieting just to get what is, most of the time, a temporary result.
When a new diet fad is introduced, people tend to change from one diet to another, spending more money again. One of the aspects of dieting is that you can end up with worse health problems than before you started the diet.
I have met many people who have lost weight with some crash diet, only to start feeling weak and miserable. I have only seen a few people lose weight permanently without having negative health effects afterward.
These are the most important issues: Most important is to improve your health, and second is to lose weight. The few people who did lose weight, in fact, did not do a diet, but rather, they changed their whole lifestyle.
It might sounds like a broken record, but it is about losing bad habits, getting used to good ones, and replacing the bad foods we are eating with healthy and nutritious options.
The Yo-Yo Effect
Many people who have gained some weight decide to temporarily eat less, and sometimes it almost turns into fasting; in doing this, the people hope to lose some extra pounds.
By doing this, they put their body into a fasting mode. As a result of this, they indeed lose weight, but once they end this diet - because it is impossible to continue forever - and go back to "normal," they gain weight again and end up heavier than before.
So again, a regular metabolism is very important, and that is why we need to eat six times per day, which is the basis of my Eat6X Method.
The Different Diet Groups
We can divide the many diets we know into several groups or categories. These are as follows: low calorie diets, protein diets, low carb diets, and the low fat diets.
Proteins, fat, and carbohydrates should be the main components of our food, each in a certain percentage, such as one third of the diet composed of each. If you do not stick to an appropriate balance in these three groups, you will probably experience problems.
Diets very often concentrate on one group, and on lowering, or even eliminating, that group entirely.
Another diet category includes meal replacements, pills, tablets, and other herbal remedies to lose weight. We will take a closer look at some of the above groups and examine the pros and cons of each.
Low Calorie Diets
Examples of this are the soup diet, the fruit diet, the vegetable diet, the egg diet, and the raw-food diet.
These are all one-sided diets that concentrate on eating only one food group - for example, fruits or vegetables. These diets are highly lacking in variety, and that is why most people don't stick to them for the long-term.
Another disadvantage of these one-food-group diets is the lack of necessary nutrients and vitamins. For instance, if you stop eating meat during one of these low calorie diets, then you end up missing out on the vitamins found in meat that are not found in other foods.
You will suffer from a Vitamin B12 deficiency unless you compensate for this by taking B12 vitamin pills. Furthermore, if you only eat raw foods, you will begin to crave something cooked now and then.
I know one lady who lost almost 40 pounds on such a diet, but she has now gained it all back, because she became bored of eating only raw food all of the time.
Low Carb Diets
Popular examples of this type of diet include the Atkins, Paleo, and South Beach diets.
With these diets, one must abstain from eating almost anything containing bread, potatoes, rice, pasta , or sugar, and that is a very difficult thing to do.
This is the reason that people end these diets after a while, go back to their original eating patterns, and become heavier than before starting the diet.
I often see the Yo-Yo Effect with these people.
Other Diets and Meal Replacements
Protein diets, such as the Dukan diet, meal replacements, and low fat diets all have the same effect. They exclude one group of food or replace what you are used to eating, and they, much like the other diets mentioned before, are difficult to incorporate into your lifestyle, at least for a long period of time.
This post is just to make people aware that diets do not work and I will post more about how to change your lifestyle slowly in the coming weeks.
Danny
