How not to try to lose weight?

If you were to search just about any website or for that matter a news portal, or read any magazine of newspaper, switch on the TV and flip through a veritable plethora of a number of channels and the odds are you will be easily bombarded with the very latest in ‘miracle weight loss’ drugs, most of which are touted as the panacea of all weight related problems.

And it’s not just drugs, but fad diets as well. Sometimes it’s the ‘grapefruit diet’, other times it’s the ‘onion soup and lentils’ one. All of them promising that perfect physique/figure in only a fortnight (on average.)

However, almost all of these fad diets/drugs have at least one thing in common.  They almost always never work, and if and when they do, the damage to the body is nearly incalculable.

Take the example of appetite suppressants. These potent pills if taken in excessive doses can increase blood pressure and trigger strokes and heart attacks even in young people in their teens and twenties.  The sight of such individuals being physically disabled and condemned to a lifetime of visiting rehabilitation centers is truly a tragic event indeed!

Fad diets are hardly any better. While they may not be as dangerous as unregulated drugs, but any questionable weight loss gains are quickly lost as the body fights back by retaining its fat deposits in the belief that famine has stuck and it should hoard its fat deposits. Once we restrict our food intake, our body slows down our metabolism to compensate for its loss of nutrients.

By and large, this is how most of our bodies are genetically programmed since the days we lived in caves many eons ago and food was scarce, while being able to eat till satiety was a rare event indeed.

When one tries a crash diet, one will likely lose kilos very rapidly indeed: In fact, in a matter of days, since he will be eating a very restricted diet indeed. Unfortunately, most of the weight lost in such a way is just water weight. Once the diet is stopped and normal eating habits and lifestyle resumed, odds are that he will gain the weight back – with a few additional kilograms thrown in for good measure, effectively ensuring that he is worse off than ever before.

More ever, nutritional deficiencies that poorly researched diets cause may well also lead to long term complications including both muscle as well as hair loss. Since both require protein to grow and quite a few crash diets are anti-protein.

If a diet is very low in calories, the body will look for other ways to acquire energy. One of these ways is by actually digesting the muscles. This is actually detrimental to weight loss because muscles help burn more calories even when the body is at rest.

Unfortunately, the tendency to take shortcuts when it comes to weight loss is very common amongst most people. A long-term lifestyle change that includes clean eating, exercise as well as healthy supplements is the only way when it comes to long term weight loss.

Written By: Kinza Chaudhary