It is estimated that about 1/3 of Americans are on some type of diet on any given day. It is also estimated that around 1/3 of Americans are now considered obese. Furthermore, there are more diets than ever out there on the market. You have the blood type diet, low fat, no carb, no meat, gluten free, ancestor diet (this one is really laughable), shake diet, etc. and the list goes on and on. To be more truthful, they should call these plans what they really are...things like the starve yourself plan, the muscle burning diet, the Hollywood metabolism destroyer, nutrient deprivation system and the list could keep going. The bottom line is that diets WILL rob you of long term success with your weight loss and health. People too easily fall into the trap of sabatoging long term success by soley focusing on the scale going down the first 12 weeks or so. When you consider the fact that most of the weight loss on diets is muscle and water, you can then realize that you are flushing your metabolism down the toilet. Most people can only manage to stay on a diet for 12 weeks...if that long...and then go back to eating like they did before the diet. Yes, they have lost say 30lbs, but now there metabolism is 30-40% slower which means they are going to be packing on fat fast. It is the deadly yoyo effect, but each time they yoyo, it gets worse. Yoyo is a NoNo and will make your metabolism very SlowSlow!
Now, consider this...the average person that I deal with is not eating enough food and can't lose weight or is gaining weight. IF YOU EVER WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT THE RIGHT WAY AND KEEP IT OFF, YOU HAVE TO EAT MORE TO BURN MORE. Your metabolism is a furnace and if you feed it more HEALTHY logs, it will burn hotter and give off more energy...hence, calorie burning. The diet mentality is only making people more fat and unhealthy and is leading them down a road of failure. With diets, you don't have to worry about calories making you fat, you should worry about a lack of calories making you fat. I'll never forget the woman that I trained a couple years ago. She was absolutely terrified of calories. She was very frustrated because she had gained 10lbs over the last year. Get this...she exercised 5 days a week for an hour and only ate 500 calories a day...UNBELIEVABLE! I about fell off my stability ball when she told me this...I told her that 500 calories is like one of my snacks and she only ate that much in a WHOLE DAY. She gained 10lbs in the year only eating 500 calories a day! How? She shut down her metabolism by starving herself. If you try to trick your body, you will end up getting the short end of the stick.
I tell people, don't let yourself get too hungry or too full. It is ok to get hungry as that is our body's cue to tell us to eat, but if you wait until you are starving, your metabolism will go looking for calories in your muscles. You also may not get hungry, which simply means that you have trained your metabolism to be slow and you need to retrain it by eating more...even when you don't feel like you are hungry. On the flipside, you should never eat until too full as this will cause a metabolic dump. This means that your body is overloaded with calories and will store many of them as fat. It takes your stomach 15 minutes or so to catch up to your brain. If you eat too fast, you will not feel FULL until it's too late. So, eat until you are satisfied (not still hungry and not full). It's at that point where you feel like you could keep eating, but if you stopped, you would not feel anymore hunger. You have to learn to listen to your body and be in tune with it. You have to be disiplined to eat the right foods 90% of the time and leave 10% for "error." This is not an article about what foods to eat, so I will not dive into that right now. I just wanted to point out the fact that this way of eating that I have talked about only works if you eat the right foods most of the time because not all calories are created equal. That is for another day though.
To sum it up, don't starve yourself, embrace carbs and fats (the healthy ones), never stay hungry, don't eat until you can't move, make wise food choices 90% of the time, keep your metabolic furnace burning all day and don't listen to the diet hype. If you ever want to become a lean mean metabolic machine, you have to ditch the diet mentality or your world will be a fat reality. Feed the muscles the right blend of premium fuel at regular intervals throughout the day and couple that with HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) as well as an appropriate resistance training program and you will be well on your way. You will never have to worry about "dieting" again. Afterall, the first 3 letters of the word DIEt are...
