For the purpose of this particular list, a diet is anything a person is doing temporarily in order to lose weight. They are any changes in habit that involve denying extreme hunger, avoiding or eating solely any particular food groups, and ingesting any kind of supplement for the purpose of battling the bulge. They tend to be drastic, desperate and depriving in nature. Here are 7 solid reasons why you should steer clear.
#1 They don’t work.
Again and again studies have shown that diets don’t work. Broken record warning; you’ve got to make real, lifelong changes in order to lose weight and keep it off. Here's a Healthy, Ideal Grocery Shopping List; a good place to start.
#2 Inevitably, any pill, powder, or substance is going to end up proving to cause long term health repercussions.
We live in a strange, spooky sort of era where one day we are taking supplements of something that’s supposed to enhance our health, and the next day we learn it causes cancer or some other terrible ailment. Diet products are the scariest version of this scenario, and most of them are never even FDA approved- not that the FDA doesn’t approve of a large number of seriously questionable “consumables”.
#3 Thin is the wrong goal; genuine health should be your focal point; weight loss follows.
Weight loss follows healthy eating and regular physical activity. It just does. We’ve got some fantastic scientific minds out there trying to find a solution to problems that already have a solution. What constitutes and creates good health? Wholesome, clean eating and incorporating frequent movement into our days. Those two same variables are also what make extra weight drop off of the body.
#4 Diets and diet foods are expensive! And a huge waste of money.
The industry was created for it’s income potential, and there’s a lot of money spent each year on keeping up the concept that a diet is a necessary component of fighting back against our nation’s growing waists. People always complain about the cost of eating healthy but have you ever checked out the price per ounce on "weight loss" foods? It’s astronomical. You would be hard pressed to find any kind of produce that was as high in price as most diet foods when compared pound by pound. Skip the expensive gimmicky foods and products that are chalk full of fake sweeteners, preservatives and manmade ingredients that are far from consumption-worthy.
#5 There’s no faster way to lose your soul or your smarts than with a diet!
Life’s short; do you really want to spend it adhering to an overly authoritarian diet that’s only going to work for as long as your on it, anyway? Plus, they dull your brainpower; studies have shown that people who are on strict diets actually have slower reaction times than those who aren’t. Low carb diets have specifically been shown to affect memory and cognitive skills. Keep your sanity and your smarts by going the healthy route with clean eating and exercising.
#6 Odds are, you’ll end up gaining weight on or after a diet.
Let’s just pretend that the plan isn’t dangerous, and it doesn’t do any long term damage. Let’s just pretend that you have reached a point where you are feeling desperate enough that you don’t even care; you just want to see the numbers on the scale budge. Even if you were feeling that distressed over your weight, keep in mind that people typically only end up gaining back any weight they’ve lost on a diet, and then some.
#7 Drastic diets often cause the body to lose muscle tissue, which slows metabolism and makes it harder to lose weight.
Starvation diets cause a laundry list of health risks, one of them being the loss of muscle tissue. Some people might not care about this initially, if their goal is just to become “smaller”, but muscle burns calories at a higher rate than other bodily tissues. Lose muscle tissue and you slow your metabolism, which is the worst kind of opponent you want against you while you’re trying to drop weight (now and in the future).
So if not via dieting, how does one lose weight? Eat clean; choose fresh and raw as often as possible. Avoid eating overly processed foods and choose whole grains like steel cut oats, quinoa, or couscous over refined sugars and flours. Combine that with regular cardio and strength training workouts, or even just a consistently active lifestyle, and you’ll start to feel and look better fast.