All diets are, pardon the pun, a big fat lie. The diet industry is a $70 billion industry with a 95% failure rate, do the math! Despite the thousands of books written on the subject and the gyms popping up on every corner…we are just getting fatter. It is scary to think that the adolescent generation today is the most obese of them all. Close to 70% of Americans are overweight today compared to 58% in 1983. If this kind of weight increase was considered a disease, it would be an epidemic.
The word diet is problem number one as far as I am concerned. Diet implies that is short term. When you hear someone say “I am on a diet”, what they are saying is I am eating in a certain way for a brief period of time to lose weight. So the diet is going to end? Why would it have to end if it is such a healthy way to eat? We need to change the way we think. The nutritional path we choose needs to be one that is logical, realistic and one that can be sustained for the rest of your life. It should not be one of deprivation of any kind. That it is unrealistic. It should not be one that promotes muscle loss such as any where the carbohydrates and or calories are too low, it WILL backfire. It leads to binge eating episodes. Calories being too low also utilizes lean muscle as an energy source hence the fat burning machinery is lost. That just doesn’t make sense.
The problem with diets is that they focus primarily on the scale moving. Think of a bunch of cotton balls that weigh one pound and now think of a rock that weighs one pound. The cotton balls represent the fat in your body and the rock is your muscle. Think of the space that pound of cotton balls takes up compared to that rock. That right there best describes why the scale is not a good depiction of progress. You could take a 125 lb woman with 15% body fat and put her next to a 125 lb woman with 30% body fat. Guess who will look better and be healthier? People who are obsessed with the weight on the scale just drive themselves crazy. Some of the most successful people in this industry never weigh themselves You should know if your successful by looking in the mirror and by the way your clothes fit you.
Lets take the average “dieter”, and assume they are 55 years old and weigh 200 pounds, man or woman, doesn’t really matter. They go on a fad diet to lose weight quick. It works and they lose 30 pounds in a relatively short amount of time. The perfect “dieter” will lose a minimum of 4 pounds of muscle per 10 pounds lost, especially if they are not strength training. The fad dieter will through deprivation will most likely lose 8 pounds of muscle per 10 pounds lost. So lets round down and say they have lost 20 pounds of muscle per the 30 total, when they put it back on as history has shown us, they will put it all back in fat. So now we are back to 200lbs with 24 lbs less muscle. Well we all now muscle burns fat. One pound of muscle burns off an average of 60 calories a day, just sitting on your body. Now go and try to lose that same 30 pounds with that much less muscle to help you. Good luck!