Top Five Reasons You Should NOT Go On A Diet This New Year

As the New Year approaches, the rush to the Mecca of yearly weight loss attempts is upon us and with so many “solutions” out there the one that seems to be good ol’ faithful is the “diet.” Ol’ faithful, now wouldn’t that insinuate a tried and true solution? Well, not this year it seems and your chances are pretty darn good it will never be if long term weight loss is the goal.

When the word “diet” comes to mind, the phrase “calorie deprivation” can always be associated with something that asks you to take in fewer calories than your body needs to sustain basic metabolic function. You can lump ninety nine percent of the commercial diets in there as well as the diet centers. Just look at all of the repeat customers who believe “it worked” for them in the past. Here are five empowering truths about your typical diet that will hopefully steer your vehicle of weight loss ambition down another path and have you place the blame on the diet and not your lack of willpower or ability to commit.

1. The scale lies! The only thing the scale can do and do very well is tell you how many pounds you weigh under gravity at any given moment; that’s it! It can’t distinguish between fat, muscle, bone, organ or water weight. So when the diet counselor announces, “Denise has lost 5 pounds her first week,” she has lost three things: The first is what most of us now know and that’s water, which is meaningless in the pursuit of long term weight loss yet a wonderful trick to make you think “it’s working.” The other two things are some fat and some muscle. One of those you want to lose the other you definitely do not.

2. Your body backs off on thyroid hormone production. Your body is a wonderful machine that is down right ignorant to what you are trying to do. Yeah, “you” know you are trying to lose weight but your body thinks you are starving so in an effort to “slow” things down and conserve fuel, it backs off production of these metabolic regulators to get your body better at burning fewer and fewer calories.

3. Your body begins to feed off of its own muscle tissue. This is bad, bad, bad but yet so good for your morale because even when you lose muscle the scale says “keep it up, it’s still working.” Muscle is the actual location where fat is burned and where the bulk of the calories are burned within your body (even at rest). So in the body’s continuing effort to “slow” things down, it sees muscle tissue as a calorie burning liability and begins to literally eat away at its own calorie burning furnace. So would it make sense to slowly cripple your body’s ability to burn fat effectively by depriving it of calories and forcing it to feed off of its own muscle? Nope.

4. Your body is priming itself for fat storage. Now that you’ve compounded a slower thyroid with a loss in muscle mass, your body is now able to survive off of fewer calories. But since your body thinks it is starving it needs some stored fuel for survival. It’s nothing more than a protective mechanism that’s been around since humans first walked the earth so in an effort to conserve fuel your body is producing more of an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase which primes your fat cells for storage. Why? Because fat is the source of fuel your body can survive off of the longest.

5. Your brain eventually sends out neurotransmitters that force you to “give in” and “blow” the diet. The “binge;” it’s the point where you can’t take it anymore. Willpower (so you think) is shot and that one little cookie turns into everything the pantry and refrigerator has to offer. Here’s the “a-ha.” It has very little to do with willpower but instead is a physiological response that drives you to the quickest source of energy; sugar and enriched carbohydrates. Why? Because your body is saying “you need energy to find food you moron, you’re starving.” Those neurotransmitters are also driving you to the source of fuel you can live off of the longest; fat. Couple that with a body that’s primed to readily convert simple sugars and enriched carbohydrates into fat and you have a bathroom scale that’s going to be a ticking time bomb for delivering emotional distress about five to seven weeks after you began the diet.

Look, diets do not work for human beings if long term weight loss is the goal and this is further evidenced by America’s forever expanding waistlines. There’s no need to keep citing statistics; just look around. In a 50 billion dollar fitness and weight loss industry that almost always fails to give you what you pay for and then has you blaming yourself for failing, it is vital to understand that a diet is a flawed approach that willpower and commitment have very little to do with. Lack of commitment will only be a limiting factor to your success when you do have the right approach and a diet is not one of them. So this New Year, make a resolution to NOT go on a diet but instead to find a solution that will allow you to take control of the way you look and feel this year and the rest of the years to follow!

© David Otto * All Rights Reserved

David Otto is a Personal Trainer in the Newport News/ Williamsburg area of Virginia who specializes in body transformation. For more information on how you can change the way you look and feel, send an email to [email protected]

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