So do you need to diet to lose weight? Never! Once you cut down on food and start to count calories, you have already started down the road to certain failure. Quite simply, our body is not designed to diet. Nature created our metabolism to handle that and it is not able to cope with the constant interference and frequent changes to what used to be our traditional foods. It is particularly damaging when we add indigestible foods we were never meant to eat, in favor of foods our body used to depend on.
The reason no one has told you diets never work, is that the medical profession and the public in general, always used to see weight problems as a sign of self indulgence and therefore entirely self inflicted. So nobody protested when some thirty to forty years ago, self professed experts decided that this was an ignored little niche market in the area of health just begging to be hijacked.
There were no laws to curb the actions of these people and nobody showed any interest in trying to change that. For more than thirty years, dozens of self proclaimed experts have launched one diet after another, and if permanent weight loss is the measure of a diet’s success or failure, and what else could it be? Then every diet, ever created, has proved a dismal failure. To this day, not a single one of these diets, often suggested to be scientific, have ever been subjected to scrutiny. No valid research has ever been conducted to determine whether a diet could be harmful to the body or have any benefits whatsoever. In short, there is no magic diet, there never was and there never will be, because No diets can work permanently.
I ask you to please turn on your common sense for a moment and follow me on this: The fact is that when you deprive your body of food it will switch into famine mode. That’s the only natural response it can offer and that means it will slow down your metabolism to a crawl and store all but the most essential foods on your body as fat. The ultimate result of any diet will always, inevitably end up a weight gain NOT a weight loss.
The less you eat, the more your body will panic and the more extreme is the response. The more often you go on a diet the quicker you are likely to trigger a famine alert. That means, the more you diet the sooner you will fail to lose weight.
Any diet that deprives you of food will always have the same result…failure. You may be a strong willed person, who has the persistence and resolve to stick to a diet to the conclusion. But once you weight has gone so has your reason for dieting and at some point you will have to stop. Sooner or later, bit by bit you will begin to relax. no one can sustain hunger and food cravings forever. Eventually the weight will return triumphant.
Once it is all back, your body won’t stop there. It will always demand some extra weight as a buffer against the next famine. And so it goes, around the merry-go-round. At some point, down the road, you will decide never to diet again, What is the point? Exactly!
Unfortunately, if you have gone through this whole process, and you are back to your normal food intake, it may not be as easy as you think to stop your cravings. Just ending a diet is not enough. If your body has received a lot of diet abuse you could well be saddled with a permanent food addiction and that is going to compound your weight problem tenfold. By then, you could easily join the legion of people who have moved from overweight to obesity in just a short period of time. From there it is only a quick step to type2 diabetes.
I cannot prove what causes the body to suddenly trigger a rash of food cravings. But I can give you an educated guess. You have switched to food groups your body has not been designed to process. Foods that nature never intended you to eat in the first place. At the same time, you intermittently cut down your overall intake of food. You confuse your metabolism with inconsistency. Sometimes you diet, sometimes not. At other times you over eat. To top it off, you favor foods which look good and give the illusion of satisfaction and you pay little or no attention to the most important food of all.
Your body is no wiser than you are, least of all to the question of whether or when you are likely to starve yourself on a diet and when you are likely to stop. So maybe it has gone into permanent famine mode. That means it will send hunger and craving messages to your brain even when you have just finished eating. Cravings can be very powerful. Ask any addict.
This is not something new that has come along in the last couple of years. This is something that has been growing slowly and insidiously for thirty to forty years. Basically since we decided to improve on nature and design better, more attractive and more healthy looking foods, (and people) than those nature designed. That is not to say that nature designed us to eat caveman food. Nature has proved it can be flexible, but it has its limits.
We all know that this is not the only time people have decided to improve on nature; look at climate change. The only thing that seems to be certain is that when we pick a fight with nature and we go too far, we lose….Always!
Kirsten Plotkin Author
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