Things to consider about dieting
What is a diet?
A diet is nothing else originally than the collection of foods and drinks, that a person regularly consumes.
A doctor or a dietitian can prescribe a special diet. However there’s plenty of other special types of diets, that people try to follow for shorter or longer time periods for various reasons. But the main reason is mostly to lose weight.
Diets are closely linked to weight loss for most people. So it has only one purpose, to lose weight. Most of these popular diets don’t care about health. There are people, who start dieting based on their own ideas, and there are others, who follow a dieting method developed by someone else. These are for example orange/grapefruit diet (1930), amphetamine diet (1945), cabbage soup diet (1950), fast food diet (1953), parasite diet (1955), Weight Watchers (1963), Slimming World (1969), stone age diet (1975), Oprah liquid diet (1988), low fat diet (1989), Atkins diet (1994), Zone diet (1995), macrobiotic diet (2000), South Beach diet (2003), paleo diet (2010), keto diet (2016)… There were some other smaller dieting trends, but these are the major ones. These are coming and going … There are people, who can use one, while others succeed with the other. (The dates show when they became mainstream and they can be different country by country.)
Why is it like that? How can it happen, that one works for this person, but not to the other? The answer is: we are all unique.
There are people, who live happily eating only fast food, while they drink alcohol and smoke regularly. At the same time, there are people, who eat a very healthy diet, follow a healthy lifestyle, and still die early from an illness.
There are people, whose life is saved through Gerson therapy, a therapy that focuses on consuming plenty of healthy carbs, while strongly restricting fats and proteins. But there are other people, who can thank their life to a very low carb, low protein, but very high fat keto diet. There’s one common thing in these two: they focus on unrefined real food.
What diets focus on: they focus on calorie and/or fat and/or carb reduction, or they simply restrict everything.
When people figure out the „needed” amount of calories, they don’t care about the following details:
- what is the original weight
- how much is the base energy need of a person, that covers the energy need of basic body functions, like breathing, heart, brain, thyroid functioning, digestion etc (BMR, basal metabolic rate)
- activity level and type of the person
- how vitamins, minerals, fiber get supplied to the body…
Beside all these diets are limited to eating, they don’t take any other details into account. However these details can make or brake the success.
- Sleeping
- Physical activity
- Stress management
- Health
- Family and social relationships
Most of the people can think only about macronutrients, like carbs, proteins and fats. The majority has no clue about the importance of micronutrients, like vitamins, minerals, antioxidants (phytonutrients). But that bit is just as important, if not more important in the big picture.
Death of the DIEts
The word diet includes its main message: die… Diets normally don’t lead to death, but in some extreme cases they can be lethal. From the other side, diets are not providing the long term results, that people are dreaming about. The failure is nearly unavoidable. If these diets work properly, there wouldn’t be so many different diets and so called magic pills on the market and the statistics wouldn’t show obesity and health crises all over in the western world.
Why do I think that most diets end with a failure? Because people have to try newer and newer diets to show some results. But these results are temporary in most cases and then people experience the yoyo effect.
During the diets, people try to avoid so many things, thinking that they’ll lose weight, get “cleaner” that way…
For a short period of time, it might be true. They experience weight loss, but they don’t learn any new habits, that can be useful for the future. So after finishing the diet, at the end of the goal period or when the person finally gives up, and eat up the first piece of cake they see, everything gets back to its original “normal” (not really) track.
At the same time, while they are on a very restrictive diet, they might not provide the right micronutrients, that are needed for detoxification, working against themselves. They might not provide enough macronutrients and calories to keep up metabolic rate, so it slows down. The result? Slowing rate of weight loss and after the diet a faster gain weight than ever before.
I can hear some of you are saying … “but the orange diet worked well for me” or “there’s nothing better, than the cabbage soup diet”…
I can hear from the paleo community, that many of them reached their goals, they lost weight, became healthier and they can do it as a lifestyle, meaning long term. But it doesn’t work for everybody. If it works for everybody, there wouldn’t be so many people, who divert themselves to the other team, focusing more on carbs and find a solution there.
We are all different. A simple way to explain it. There are cars … They have the same purpose to take us from A to B. But some work with petrol, some work with diesel and some work with electricity. And there’s a combination of these. (Ok, probably not petrol and diesel.) If you fill petrol into a diesel car, you damage it. It’s true the other way round too. There are hybrid cars, where you can use petrol and electricity to fuel the car. And there’re electric cars, where you can’t use anything else, just electricity. Some cars are ok with lower grade (octane) petrol, while other petrol cars can utilize only high grade ones.
We work similarly. Some of us is happy and healthy on plenty of carbs, some of us become very ill, from the same. Same applies to fats, even to healthy ones and to protein too. We have to find our own fuel, or mix of fuels to reach optimal health and wellbeing. But it’s still not the full picture.
We are all different, unique. So our diet and lifestyle have to be somewhat different too.
Just because a diet worked for one, it doesn’t mean, that it works for everybody. There’s no such thing, that one diet fits all, just like a given clothe won’t fit everybody.
Is every temporary diet bad?
No. There are diets, that are prescribed by doctors, dieticians, nutritionist for several weeks or months, to alleviate the burden from the body, to let it heal, reverse different conditions. In many cases most of the foods can be reintroduced step by step, but there can be some extreme cases, when plenty of foods can’t be reintroduced.
Stop dieting!
If it’s not recommended by a doctor, dietitian, nutritionist, then stop dieting, if the purpose is simply weight loss. Eat unrefined foods, that can be eaten raw or cooked by you, like veggies, gluten free whole grains, fruits, nuts, seeds, meat, poultry, fish, egg. Avoid all foods, that is an allergen in your case, or causes intolerance for you. Avoid foods swimming in fat, even if it’s made by you. I’ll talk about it in a separate post. Believe me, you can have more than enough fats from whole foods, without using added fat for cooking.
And don’t forget:
- Don’t starve
- Drink enough clean WATER
- Sleep enough
- Learn to deal with stress and relax
- Move every day at least 15 minutes.
References:
https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/diet
http://drhoffman.com/article/theres-no-one-size-fits-all-diet-according-to-new-research-2/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160816092217.htm
https://www.livestrong.com/article/244490-do-low-calorie-diets-slow-down-metabolism/
