Forget Fads. A healthy diet is always
in style.
The idea of losing weight without putting in some hard work is appealing. It’s also unrealistic.
Ever-popular fad diets (extreme diets) will not actually boost your metabolism or magically burn off fat. Unfortunately, there is no food that can burn fat. Some foods with caffeine may temporarily speed up your metabolism and your heart rate, but they do not cause weight loss.
Focus on the Positive
When dieting, focus on what you can eat, not on what you must give up.
You want to keep the weight off? Slow down.
Fad diets like the grapefruit diet, cabbage soup diet and others aren’t all bad. If you stick with these diets as long as you can, you will lose weight. Losing weight is a good thing if you’re not losing too much too fast. Losing weight at a rapid rate of more than 3 pounds per week (after the first couple of water-weight weeks) may increase your risk for developing gallstones (painful clusters of solid material in the gallbladder). In fact, the National Institutes of Health recommends gradual weight loss of ½ -2 pounds per week until you meet your weight loss goal. Making healthy food choices, eating moderate portions and building exercise into your daily life is a great way to lose weight and keep it off.
Eat Smart
The only proven way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than your body uses as fuel for your activities.
So do fad diets work or what?
Fad diets only work for the short term. Why? To be comprehensive and successful, weight loss plans must incorporate proper eating and effective exercise. Fad diets are typically designed only to get you down to your desired weight as quickly as possible often without providing structure to change the habits that made you overweight in the first place. Plus, fad diets probably don’t provide all the nutrition required by the human body. Many of these diets eliminate entire food groups. Your body needs a combination of water, vitamins, protein, minerals, fats, carbohydrates and fiber. None of those things should be omitted from your diet. When you’re dieting, it’s more important than ever to eat a good balance of foods and nutrients. If you don’t, your body will attempt to compensate by craving foods the fad diet doesn’t recommend. Then you splurge and never get back on the diet because of the restrictive nature.
For instance, the grapefruit diet was developed in 1972. Has anyone been eating only grapefruit for decades? Not likely.
Before you start any diet, talk to your doctor. He or she will be able to supply you with honest answers about the kind of diet best for you.
It’s dinnertime. Somewhere, anyway.
Not eating close to bedtime is a good idea to prevent some discomforts like heartburn or indigestion. However, it won’t make a dent in your fat stores. Eating your main meal at 8 p.m. will burn up exactly the same amount of calories as having your main meal at lunch.
Be cautiously optimistic.
It pays to be skeptical. But it also pays to keep your eyes and ears open for solid new research or programs that might represent genuine advances. While marketers are polluting the airwaves and the Internet, scientists are tackling exercise and diet issues that have long been ignored, offering insight to the pros and cons of popular eating plans, diet drugs, surgical procedures, fitness regimens and exercise devices. So make it a point to question where your information is coming from – a credible scientist, a company trying to sell their product or maybe something in between.
A back slip does not have to be a backslide.
Don’t give up. Everyone does it. An ice cream sundae. A plate of fries. Derailing a diet is not hard to do. If you have a slip up, give yourself a break and move on. You get can back on track and lose the weight.
