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5 Reasons Why Not To Diet & What To Do Instead
I am a holistic nutritionist, and I HATE diets.
Okay, I realize hate is a strong word, and that there is something to be learned from all life experiences, so let me phrase this another way:
I am a holistic nutritionist, and I do not believe that a diet is ever going to get you the long-term weight loss and HEALTH that you desire.
But let’s back up for a second – first off, what do I mean when I say “diet?” The definition of the word I am using in the context of this article is:
“A special course of food to which one restricts oneself, either to lose weight or for medical reasons.”
Diets are a multi billion-dollar industry, and right away that should tip you off that they are not something you are going to want to take part in. When there is that much of a financial interest you can be sure that truth is being diluted, stretched and down right ignored to help support the bottom line of those involved.
Here are my top five reasons for never recommending a ‘diet’ to any of my clients, and what I suggest you do instead of dieting.
Reason Diets Suck #1: They Are Designed To Trick You
The diet industry is very clever. They snafu you into thinking that they have found the magical cure for ending the battle of the bulge. They sell you shiny ideas in shiny books and shiny pills in shiny bottles – telling you what they know you want to hear. The reason that they are doing this is not to help you improve your health – they are simply trying to improve the size of their collective bank accounts.
Reason Diets Suck #2: They Are Designed To Fail
The truth about diets is that they are built to be unsustainable. If the diet industry actually came out with something that really worked, they would put themselves out of business! Remember again, the diet industry is a business – and businesses must continue to make money. In the case of diets the magic formula is creating something that works for a short period of time – so that people have a reason to believe it will work and therefore have a reason to pay money for whatever is being offered – and then to fail so that you have to keep coming back and paying for the next best thing.
Reasons Diets Suck #3: They Are Built On Restriction
The whole idea of restriction sets you up for a long-term battle with food. Understand that when we were wandering the globe in our hunter gatherer days, we had times of feast – when we stumbled upon a mango grove and consumed them to our hearts content – and then times of famine – when the mangos ran dry and we had to pack up and wander some more to find the next source of food. Due to this feast/famine cycle, our bodies developed the ability to store calories in our fat cells during times of feast, for later use when there was a famine. In our world today most of us do not experience literal famines. This was an amazing life preserving system back then, but now when you go on a diet and you begin to restrict either your caloric intake (think Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig), your intake of a particular macronutrient group (think Atkins) or a combination of these (think South Beach or The Zone) your body is going to act and react as though you are in a famine. This is why you can stick to your plan for a week or two, and then all of a sudden your cravings for the highest calorie, highest fat ‘no-no’ foods kicks in to the point where you can’t fight it. That is your body’s natural urge to find food that would have kept you walking and searching back in our primitive days. Without that drive our species would have died out. Now, we really don’t need that overwhelming drive to eat because so many of us have an abundance of food. You are not crazy when you feel like you lose control over your appetite after dieting for a few weeks – it is your biology.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/09/5-reasons-why-not-to-diet-what-to-do-instead/
