Living Healthy
Why Diets Are F****** Useless
For some reason, there are hundreds of millions of people every year who (voluntarily) restrict what, when and how they eat to lose weight. These people think that they will live healthier by eating less for a short period. But isn’t all of that useless? Aren’t there better ways to lose weight and live healthier?
I’d think so!
So to start this article, just consider what Jay Woodman says about diets.
“Diets don’t really work and can be destructive, but if you get healthy overall (mind, body, spirit) then your weight balances naturally.” (Jay Woodman)
Disclaimer: After reading the introduction of this post, you might think that I am just some random guy on the internet who isn’t disciplined enough to stick to a diet plan. But this isn’t true, I just generally think that there are much smarter ways to lose weight in the long term than to do a diet.
The Yo-Yo Effect
The first reason why dieting is useless is what happens to you after your diet ends. Scientists call it the Yo-Yo Effect. The Yo-Yo effect predicts that you are going to gain weight again after finishing your diet. That’s because most people, who do a diet, only need one because of what they eat on a day-to-day basis. So if they start a diet they might temporally drastically change their eating habits but in the long run, they are going to fall back to their old habits. This way they are going to keep gaining weight even if they might be able to lose some while doing a diet for a few weeks.
If you visualize this trend, you will discover a graph looking like this
But why is that?
Because you need to eat healthy more than once to stay healthy.
How to lose weight the easy way
But if dieting isn’t the best way to lose weight, how should you lose weight then? There are three important things to keep in mind to lose weight and stop gaining weight in the future. Those three things are getting into a slight calorie deficit whenever you want to lose weight, generally eating healthy, and being active.
Calorie deficit
Every time you do something, your body needs energy. You give this energy to your body by consuming food, and you measure how much energy you have consumed by counting calories. Even if you seem to do nothing at all, your body will burn energy.
Yes, you even burn calories while sleeping.
Knowing that, weight management becomes stunningly easy. If you consume more calories than your body requires, you will gain weight, but if you consume fewer calories than your body requires, you will lose weight. Therefore, a lot of people, who are overweight, just consume too many calories.
The easy solution: Consume fewer calories than your body needs each day. You can calculate how many calories your body needs each day here.
But isn’t that exactly what you are doing when on a diet?
Yes. Depending on the type of diet you are on, this is basically what you are doing all day. The problem is that diets do all of this in an extreme way. Therefore, limiting you a lot.
In my opinion, you are off much better if you track how many calories you consume, and take care of always staying in a slight calorie deficit. This might take you longer to lose weight, noticeably, but in the end, it is much more fun and therefore easier to stick to.
At the end of this post, I am going to share an amazing free app with you, which is going to help you track your calorie intake.
How to maintain your weight
Now that I have explained to you how to lose weight (the easy way), let me tell you something most dieters completely forget about.
After losing weight you will need to maintain your new weight too.
There is pretty much nothing else to add to this statement. Once you have lost weight, the hard work begins because now you need to maintain your new weight. There are two ways to prevent yourself from gaining weight again. I would strongly advise you to do both things I am going to recommend to you next. They will not only prevent you from gaining weight again, but they will also help you to live a much healthier (and probably even longer) life.
Healthy nutrition
The first thing is eating healthy.
Although I am not a nutritionist by any means, I would advise you to generally stay away from consuming foods or drinks, which have a lot of sugar added to them.
For more tips and information, I would recommend you to search the internet for expert advice on what makes a healthy diet.
But does eating healthy also mean that you are not allowed to eat sweets of any sort?
This is a hotly debated topic on the Internet, so let me tell you my opinion on it. Most people think sugar is something evil. But I don’t think so. Of course, sugar does not provide any nutritional value for our bodies, but it just tastes good. That’s why I wouldn’t advise anyone to stop consuming sugar. But PLEASE don’t get me wrong on this one. I am not saying that you should eat as much sugar as you are craving for. I am saying that you should not not eat sugar just because it (theoretically) isn’t healthy. In my opinion, sugar by itself isn’t unhealthy (or at least not as unhealthy as most people think), but the problem is people just consume too much of it. It’s like with most medication, too. Everything is fine until you consume too much of it.
What I am trying to say is that, as long as you don’t eat to much sugar and you keep an eye on how many calories you have consumed already, there really is no reason to not eat sugar.
As a famous saying goes:
“The dose makes the poison” (Paracelsus)
Activity
The second thing is living an active life.
By always staying active, you will naturally burn more calories. This way, it will become much harder for you to gain weight in the future.
Pick a sport you enjoy doing, and then just go out and spend a few hours every week (consistency is key) doing it. Don’t have a sport you love? Lucky you, you have a legitimate reason to test every sport's club in town. After some time, you are going to find a sport you love. I promise.
Stay in motion!
A free tool to help you manage what you eat
I now taught you how to lose weight and maintain your body weight as soon as you have reached your desired weight. Now I want to share a very special tool with you.
My Fitness Pal
My Fitness Pal is a free app, which you can download on the app store and Google play. You can use all basic features for free, and the best thing about it is that My Fitness Pal makes it extremely easy to track what you eat. They maintain a database with millions of groceries from all around the world. The only thing you need to do when using the app is scan groceries before consuming them. The app by itself will tell you how many calories you are allowed to consume every day, depending on your current weight, age, height, and weight-loss goal. You can also connect My Fitness Pal to your favorite sports tracking app.
Does all of that mean that you should never consider dieting again?
No. Although the title of this post is “Why Diets Aren’t Worth Your Time” my problem with diets mostly is how people use them. If you're aware of what I told you about your body burning calories every day and how to maintain your dream weight, then go ahead and try a diet. This way you will lose weight much faster.
But all your effort will eventually be wasted if you aren’t able to maintain your new bodyweight
Because in the end, if you believe it or not:
Losing weight is the easy part, maintaining it is the hard one.
Disclaimer/Request: I am not a doctor, nutritionist, or personal trainer. What I wrote about in this article is my personal opinion on losing weight. So, if I got anything wrong, or you don’t agree with me on some point, let me know down below in the comments.
