Your jeans are slightly too tight around your waist and you are already preparing your new year’s resolution. How much your boyfriend says he loves you the way you are. In fact, it’s his favorite thing in the world to do: holding to your muffin top. Still, you want to lose that stubborn extra weight you are carrying.
It’s that time of the season again. Diet season it is. You start off right with a positive attitude and encourage yourself to try the ‘apple diet’. When it’s getting tough after one week you quit, this diet simply doesn’t do it for you. So let’s move over to the low carb diet. Good try, but unfortunately this is also not the right way to lose weight in the long-term. Dieting is a really bad habit and I believe we should get rid of this ritual.
Diets
What is dieting exactly? A diet is a method, by changing the way you eat, to lose bodyweight. And that’s exactly what we want, right? Burn that fat! The only problem we have here is that we can’t keep up with this losing weight game. Most diets are developed to lose as much bodyweight in a very short time. We all know that there are many disadvantages to this method.
Less is not always more
It all seems so simple: if you want to lose weight, make sure you get fewer calories than you need. Therefore most diets cut the number of calories lower than the average standard per day. But still, there are people who DON’T lose weight by jumping from diet to diet.
The thing is that once your body gets used to the low amount of calories it’s receiving on a daily base, it automatically goes into survival mode. Not a good thing I can tell you. Your metabolism will start to work slower so that your body can ‘save’ energy for later when needed.
If after a while you go back to your normal eating habits, your body is still in survival mode, whereby fats are still stored as reserves. Effects could be that you gain more weight than before you when on a diet. Yikes! Not to mention that your body could burn your muscles (instead of fats) to get back the energy. Your metabolism will work even slower and the result is that you will hardly lose any weight. Sad but true.
One or the other
There are plenty of diets out there for you to pick. Think of the low carbohydrate diet, low calories diet, low-fat diet, or high protein diet. All these methods have one thing in common: they cut out certain food groups. Whatever diet you are following, there are always things you can’t consume. Therefore you miss certain essential nutrition which is important for your body.
There are also diets who only focus on one specific food group, such as the infamous apple diet and the soup diet. By following these diets your body will experience a shortage of certain nutrition. Besides that, you easily get bored with the meal plans. After eating a dozen apples you don’t want to see any apples anymore the rest of the year. Makes sure this doesn’t happen to you.
What’s the alternative?
A diet solely with the goal of losing weight is often hard to maintain, too one-sided and unpractical. Besides that, we learn that weight loss is not guaranteed either. A good diet doesn’t exclude any food groups but teaches you not to go beyond your limits. It’s all about balance. The recommendation is to lose weight by eating healthy and wholesome, focusing on plants, fruits, whole grains, complex carbs, high-quality proteins and healthy fats in moderation. Adding variety in meals and exercise regularly. Listen to your body and learn to love your body. Remember a diet starts in the mind, not in your appearance. Work on that first.
