Obesity
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(ii) Fad diets help lose weight quickly – Not true. The only fallout of this belief is that weight loss clinics and consultants have become millionaires while people they advise are stuck with yo-yo dieting and their weight. For lifelong weight loss, you have to change poor eating habits, cooking techniques, and exercise has to become a must. When you try a fad diet, you don’t learn habits you can live with for a long time. With hundreds of diet variations out there and every health professional, diet guru, and actress telling you they have the diet, how can you find what’s right for you, Simple! Stop listening to what works for everyone else. You’re an individual. Your wants and needs are your own. What worked for your colleague at the office, or your brother; or your next-door neighbour might not work for you. Why? Probably they used the juice / soup only diet and only had 5 kg. to lose. Sure it worked for them. It was a limited diet and they didn’t have to use it very long. Don’t set yourself up for failure by trying to follow a diet that’s way too strict. Choose a way of eating you can live with for a lifetime.
(iii) Going hungry will reduce weight faster – It is a big blunder. If you plan to cut too many calories out of your diet, you’d fail. Eventually, you’ll break down and gorge on food, erasing all your gains. That’s why people who diet on and off, regain the weight they lost and more. If you get hungry when you’re dieting, then EAT. It may slow down your weight loss a fraction, but at least it’ll help you stay on track. If you can’t face big meals, it’s perfectly OK to eat several small meals through the day to recharge your metabolism. Snacking between meals is crucial to making a diet work, just don’t make a habit of it. The secret is finding a non-fattening and low-in-calorie snack that tastes good, say a carrot or an apple.
(iv) Skipping meals will achieve weight loss goals in shorter period – Again a big blunder. No matter what diet they choose, most dieters fall into the trap of skipping meals. The logic is, if they don’t eat one or two meals, they’re not taking in as much energy and they’ll lose more weight. Unfortunately for meal skippers, when the body doesn’t get regular nutrition it holds onto fat and stores it for later use because it’s not sure when its next meal is coming. Consequently, they end up creating digestive problems that make it harder to lose weight. What’s worse, when you lower your calories too much, the body goes into starvation mode; this is when you’ll really start to have problems. Then most of the weight you’re losing is muscle and water, not fat. Since muscle burns calories, your metabolism slows down.
