The new year brings a commitment to losing weight, become healthier and most of us start a diet, cue a minefield of 100’s of different companies telling you theirs is the best. Give yourself the best gift you can and make a commitment to not put your body through the stress and potential damage that diets can cause.
Make a New Years’ Resolution to NEVER DIET AGAIN!
Here’s why:
Diets don’t work. Period.
It’s not exactly breaking news that almost everyone who goes on a diet will regain the weight. But, research has always affirmed what lifelong dieters already know: The pounds may drop temporarily, but then they come back, often with five to 10 friends. UCLA professor Traci Mann led a recent meta study of 31 long-term studies on dieters, concluding that while most were able to lose up to 10% of their body weight, within four or five years “the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more.” Remember, if diets worked, we wouldn’t need to diet!
Dieting is bad for your mental and physical health.
Weight fluctuation brings a host of related side effects that can harm your physical health. Not surprisingly, it has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. The psychological impact is equally alarming. Research indicates dieters are prone to elevated cortisol (the stress hormone), and increased stress during dieting triggered binge eating. One study followed young dieting women over the course of a decade and found that the younger they started, the more prone they were as adults to self-harming behaviours like alcohol abuse and self-induced vomiting.
Your body tells you what it needs. Diets teach you not to listen.
Eating is not a learned skill; it’s an instinct. You weren’t born with a calorie calculator, but with a natural sense of when you were hungry and when you’d had enough. As a child, you discovered which foods you liked, which you hated, and how much you could eat before you got a stomach-ache. Food was just food. You didn’t know if an apple was good, bad, or an extra-special treat until someone told you it was. Living in the diet cycle is like joining a charismatic cult, the leader promises salvation, so you do whatever that person says. It’s coming from increasing sources of media, until we surrender our own instincts to follow the leader’s, and soon enough, we’re brainwashed by the promises of aesthetic utopia.
Dieting makes food the centre of your life.
When you’re on a diet, you’re constantly thinking about food: What should you bring to work for lunch? How will you handle dinner with friends? Can you get through your sister’s wedding without going over your carb limit? Food shouldn’t be the subject of those sentences. Your work, your friends, your sister’s wedding — those are the things that matter. With all that needless focus, it’s no wonder that food becomes so much harder to handle. But, what and how we eat is simply the fuel for our bodies to carry out our daily requirements and help protect us from illness.
Diets measure your life, worth, and health in weight.
You know the routine: A good day is one when you stuck to the plan, when you didn’t cheat, or when the number on the scale inched down a bit. When stuck in the cycle, you may find that you avoid social occasions unless you’ve been “good” for a few weeks. How much have you missed out on because of feelings of unworthiness? Don’t let the rest of your life’s experiences be dependent on whether you are thin. You are worth more than that and life is too precious to be measured in clothes sizing.
For more information on how to find a healthy, personalised approach losing weight & eating well get in touch with Nicola for an informal chat. Click the link to find out more about the services Nicola has to offer: https://www.breedonprioryhealthclub.co.uk/nicola-clark-personal-trainer/.
