Does Dieting Work

Hate to break it to you but not all diets are created equal. Not if you want to lose weight for long term anyway. And starvation diets (aka crash or fad diets) are the worst. Used as a quick fix to rid the body of unsightly and unwanted excess flesh, they tend to hinder rather than help your dieting efforts, and are truly awful if you are serious about good health.

What happens with starvation dieting, and this applies to meal replacement shakes as well as the outrageous fad diets that are continually promoted in women’s magazines, is that once you start eating normally again you quickly regain the weight you lost plus more. The reason for this is that your body has been in starvation mode while you were dieting so it will more than make up for it when real food comes along by storing fat for the next time your starve yourself.

There are many fad diets around these days so beware the crazy Lemon Detox and Cabbage Soup diets of the celebrity world and be selective about your weight loss plan otherwise it will all end in tears. In other words, you will get fatter as a result of your so called “diet”

While it’s tempting to try to lose weight quickly by starving yourself under the guise of a “diet”, be careful as many fad diets are low in nutrients and if you are hungry and nutrient deficient your metabolism will start to slow down making it harder to lose weight as you go.

Even the less intense calorie restrictive diets can be problematic. A study just released from the New England Journal of Medicine has revealed that following a calorie restrictive diet, the 50 participants reported feeling hungrier than before and a year later had gained, on average, at least half the weight that had been lost.

What the study found was that dieting leads our appetite-stimulating hormone, ghrelin to increase significantly from its base level, while the appetite-suppressing, metabolism-boosting hormone, leptin decreases significantly. These hormonal changes persist even a year after the initial weight loss, compelling people to eat more and regain lost weight. So you see, everything is against you if you opt for an aggressive calorie restrictive diet or worse, a starvation diet, over a sensible, healthy weight loss plan.

However, if you decide dieting is for you then try to do as much research as you can beforehand. After all, there are plenty of good, healthydiets out there but you do need to be a bit selective about it.