Why Diets Don’t Work
Short term fixes, such as diets never seem to work. This is because one needs to adopt a permanent change in habits and thinking in order to truly change and get healthy. It took me a couple of years to really make dietary and lifestyle change, so I know it’s not easy.
From a physiological point of view, when we diet, we often consume a lot less calories. This makes the body think it is being starved. To compensate for this, the thyroid gland, which regulates the metabolism of fats, protein and carbohydrates, slows down so that we burn calories slower. Therefore, when we return to our normal eating regime after the diet has ended, we put all the weight back on, plus a little extra if we’re unlucky, as the thyroid takes a little while to catch on.
The easiest way to burn calories faster is to exercise as this increases the basal metabolic rate, the rate at which our body uses energy (calories) to perform basic functions such as maintaining heartbeat, digestion, breathing, and the many chemical reactions that take place all the time. It is basically the calories you’re burning whilst sitting on your bum!
By increasing muscle, you are automatically burning more calories, as muscles contain thousands of little guys called mitochondria, which are the ‘power stations’ of the cells in our body. They burn up the food we eat (once it’s been absorbed by the digestive system) and turn it into energy.
Exercise should be combined with as natural a diet as possible. If foods come in lots of packaging and contain ingredients that you’ve never heard of and which sound like you need a degree in chemistry to understand them, then it’s not a natural food and should be avoided.
The basic rule is to eat really well 80% of the time, leaving 20% to be a bit naughty if you need to!
July 24th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Thanks for posting about this, I would like to read more about this topic.