Are you planning to start a diet plan or to join a diet program? Perhaps you want to drop your calories, and change your eating habits, but unsure what to do?
Here are 5 things that you need to know, before you jump into anything.
- Diets make you feel a failure
Diets have 95% of failure rate, which is extremely high! When diets fail they make you feel you have failed.
This feeling of failure will make you anxious. Anxiety will lead to lack of energy, focus and this evil round will just continue!
- You will develop toxic relationship with food
You are keeping unhealthy food away from your home, because if you do have it there you end up eating the full package? Does it sound right?
It makes you feel shameful, guilty and embarrassed! Eventually you beat yourself up and blame yourself having food that is not in your ‘diet plan.’ You will be invited to events that involves food, and you will not anymore be able to enjoy it without feeling guilty. It can be manageable, you just need to change how you think!
- Extreme weight loss has a long term bad effects on our health
. When you starve yourself to lose weight quickly, you are not just physically but mentally abusing your body too. This will leave your body to deal with stress. Your body will produce more cortisol hormone which can lead you to crave more fatty and sugary food and gain back weight. You will also binge or emotional eat by starving yourself. Therefore, you will not burn body fat while training as your body goes on a survival mode. You also won’t be able to build or maintain muscle mass as you need to fuel it to keep or increase it. You will start experiencing chronic fatigue, dizziness, constipation or metabolism – gastrointestinal problems, malnutrition or vitamin/mineral deficiency.
- Diets are not long-lasting!
More you tell to yourself what you can not have, more your focus is on that specific CAN’T! You will want it even more! It’s a midgame!
You will be weighing the same or more than your starting weight within one to two years
Your body won’t be able to function on low calorie diets or other food restricting diets. Either you will be counting ‘sins’ for the rest of your life.
Some diets do not only make you eat incredibly low amount of food but also are keeping you away from healthy, nutritious food you could eat. The healthy amount of weight loss is 0.5 kg-1 kg /week . This can be achieved with healthy balanced diet – Portion control. Also regular exercises like yoga (body and mind), walking, sports, weightlifting. Any activity you enjoy DOING and it does not need to be intense either to achieve your goal weight if you are easting healthily.
- Diets just do not work
I do not need to explain this point as you have got all the answers above why!
Overall , putting through our mind and body such a primitive methods will not work in long term basis.
To succeed and achieve your goals is the continuous hard work you put in. Don’t just focus on big changes, but focus on little habits too! Change the way you think about food and your relationship with it will become better.