New year, new you! We are quickly approaching the most wonderful time of year...for diets. As everyone tries to shave off those extra Christmas cookie pounds, many people's New Year's resolutions include getting thin.
However, because many people do not know how to properly achieve these goals, some unhealthy dieting habits could actually cause weight gain, instead of weight loss. If a beach body is on your list of goals for 2020, make sure to keep these tips in mind!
One of the largest issues with dieting comes with what happens if you are unable to maintain the large feat that you are taking on. While it might sound like a great idea to starve yourself for a week to lose a few pounds, as soon as you stop, you are much more likely to gain all the weight back, plus some. This is because your hormones and metabolism change as a result of dieting.
In a study by Joseph Proietto, a professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne, this theory was tested. Proietto took 50 overweight men and 50 overweight women and put them on a 550 calorie diet for eight weeks. However, after these weeks, the participants gained excess weight. This was because their brains released hormones making them feel like they were starving. Their metabolisms also slowed and more of the food they ate was stored as fat.
Unfortunately, this is not the only scientist that disproved diet effectiveness. Ulla Kärkkäinen, a licensed nutritional therapist from the University of Helsinki in Finland, says that "Often, people try to prevent and manage excess weight and obesity by dieting and skipping meals. In the long-term, such approaches seem to actually accelerate getting fatter, rather than prevent it". The fact of the matter is, lots of the weight you think you are losing when your diet is water weight. While losing water weight is not a bad thing, it can cause you to think your diet is more effective than it actually is.
Dieting then makes you hungrier, so when you eat irregularly, you end up eating much more than you would have before.
Lastly, diets usually come with rigid rules for "healthy eating" that are disconnected from internal cues like hunger or emotional issues such as stress. These are the things that make it the most difficult to stay on the diet, or what makes dieting hard. It is never healthy for you to ignore the natural messages that your body sends you. If you are hungry: eat! This is the way that your body tells you that you need more food.
Denying yourself of such food can cause a lack of energy and fatigue.
A way to troubleshoot these issues is to avoid unhealthy dieting and to, instead, make your goal to be healthier. If you focus on food that nourishes your body and stick to a plan for working out, the weight will come off. While it might take longer, weight loss done in a healthy way is much more likely to stay gone!
So, skip the diet this year! Make your New Year's resolution to set obtainable workout goals and listen to what your body needs, regardless of how simple it might sound to starve yourself for a few days. Try to set your sights on the long-term results, not the short-term fleeting ones!
