Studies Show Traditional Diets Don’t Work For Weight Loss

If you want to lose weight, chances are pretty good that you are going to do the first thing that most people do when they want to lose weight.

You try to figure out what quick weight loss diet would work best for you in order to shed those excess pounds.

There are a lot of diets to choose from. The South Beach Diet, the Atkins Diet, the Zone Diet, the Ornish diet.

They all require you to change the way that you normally eat, and to eat in a way that is not really natural and to eat foods that often don’t taste that great and may be inconvenient for you to prepare.

And chances are good that you pick a diet, any diet, and you follow it for a little while, and you lose a little weight or a lot of weight, and then you gain it back.

So you either try the same diet again - hey, it sort of worked before, right? Or you pick a new kind of diet, and again, odds are pretty good that you lose some weight.

Odds are also pretty good that you gain the weight back, and more.

How can we say this with such certainty? Because studies have repeatedly shown this. In fact, a UCLA Associate Professor of Psychology analyzed 31 long term studies of dieters and found out a disheartening fact.

The good news was that by looking at all those different studies of dieters, they found that it was not hard for people to lose five to ten percent of their body weight in six months.

These people went on all different types of diets, restricting their food intake and altering their eating patterns in numerous ways.

However at least one third to two third of people in the various dieting studies regained all of their weight AND MORE within four or five years.

This actually led Professor Traci Mann to come to this incredibly depressing conclusion: those people would have been better off if they had not gone on a diet at all!

There are other long term studies which show that repeated weight loss and weight gain can cause high cholesterol, heart disease, and can have other negative health consequences.

And the majority of these people ended up weighing MORE then when they started.

Professor Mann felt that all of that dieting was hard on the body and that, given that these people ended up heavier than before, they would have been better off never putting their bodies through the stress of dieting.

Does this tell us that everyone’s efforts to lose weight quickly are doomed to failure? Not at all, because some people are succeeding in losing weight and keeping the weight off.

Some weight loss methods simply work easier than others and are easier to stick with.

Any diet that lowers calories so much that you are constantly craving food is doomed to failure.

Any diet that requires you to drastically change your eating habits, to eat foods that you hate, to give up all of the foods that you love...is doomed to failure.

But fortunately, not all diets are so drastic or impossible to stick with. There are legitimate, effective weight loss programs that actually will work to help you to safely, effectively and permanently lose weight.

The Dangers Of A Low Carb Diet

High protein, low carbohydrate diets all come with exciting promises of quick weight loss and miracle results and pounds melting away.

And it is true that when you first start on a high protein diet, you will lose some water weight right away, perhaps as much as a few pounds a week in the first couple of weeks.

So why shouldn’t you rush out and buy a high protein low carb cookbook? Why should you avoid these trendy, popular diets?

Because they don’t work long term, and because they can actually harm your health. Yes, a high protein, low carb diet can be life-threatening. There are much safer - and faster - ways to lose weight...but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The problem with low carb diets is that they require people to eat an unnaturally high amount of protein every day, and generally high-fat protein as well.

The American Heart Association recommends getting 10 to 15 percent of your daily calories from protein. High protein diets overload the body by cramming their menus with meals that deliver 35 to 50 percent of the daily calorie intake as protein.

According to the John Hopkins Hospital, a leading medical research institution, high protein low carb diets cause the body to excrete calcium, and are associated with increased risk of heart disease and risk of kidney failure.

Here’s why:

The body normally relies on carbohydrates for energy. When you eat carbohydrates, the body breaks the carbohydrates down into simple sugars and uses them for fuel.

When you don’t eat carbohydrates your body starts raiding its store of fat and breaking it down into amino acids known as ketones. When too many ketones flood the body, the kidneys have to work overtime to eliminate them and are therefore placed under a huge strain. Ketosis is also associated with the formation of painful kidney stones.

According to a University of Chicago study done in 2002, participants who were on a high protein low carb diet for a mere six weeks had a sharply elevated rate of calcium excretion, which leads to an increased risk of osteoporosis (thinning bones). They also had a high “acid load” in their blood streams, leading to an increased risk of kidney stones, the study found.

And a study published by the American College of Nutrition found that the long term use of the Atkins Diet would result in a 25 percent increase of blood cholesterol levels.

And - as if that’s not enough - the low carb diet tends to lead to constipation and other health problems associated with low fiber diets, because high fiber cereals, fruits and many vegetables are eliminated from the meal plans

People who stay on low fiber diets long term are also at increased risk of diverticulosis, a condition in which areas of the intestines weaken and bulge outward. This condition is virtually unheard of in societies that have diets rich in fiber.

Yes, people do tend to lose some water weight right away on high protein low carb diets. But they also get fatigued, grouchy, and crave carbs constantly. And as we’ve just demonstrated, staying on those diets long term can be life threatening - AND as soon as you start eating normally again you will gain that water weight right back!

But here’s the good news: it is absolutely not necessary to risk your health with a high protein diet.

The Eight Worst Things About Low Carb Diets

New versions of low carb, high protein diets are always appearing on bestseller lists, and every new low carb diet claims to have the perfect combination of low carbohydrate high protein meals that will allow you to shed weight like a duck sheds water.

The diets claim that you can lose weight quickly with no effort. They seem like they’re the new miracle diet. What’s not to love? Why shouldn’t we all rush out and buy a low carb diet book right now?

Because they have numerous unpleasant, sometimes dangerous side effects and because numerous scientific studies show that they DON’T WORK long term - that’s why! Yes, just like with any diet, you will lose weight in the short term, but with a low carb high protein diet you will risk damaging your health and then the pounds will pile right back on as soon as you go back to eating normally.

Here are some of the unpleasant side effects that you will suffer if you stick to a low carb high protein diet:

1. High protein diets force people to enter a state of ketosis (burning ketones) which means they are excreting acetone in their urine and breath. This causes very bad breath.

2. Dizziness, as your body’s energy stores are depleted.

3. Ketosis can cause nausea.

4. Many low carb dieters report severe headaches caused by ketosis.

5. High risk of kidney stones because of an increased “acid load” in the kidneys caused by ketosis.

6. Constant cravings for sweets.

7. Exhaustion, because you are not consuming enough carbohydrates, which your body uses for energy. Which means that you won’t have enough stamina to exercise, which means you are not building muscle or aerobic capacity.

8. Low carb dieters gain all of their weight back! At a presentation of the Endocrine Society’s national meeting, a study revealed that after two years, only five percent of low carb dieters kept all of their weight off.

But don’t despair! There are alternatives to low carb diets, legitimate weight loss programs, which are safe and healthy and effective.

Crash Diets and Fitness Don’t Mix

Most dieters want to lose weight for a couple of reasons: they want to look and feel more attractive, or they want to get healthier.

And if they’re being honest with themselves, in our weight obsessed society, most dieters are probably more motivated by a desire to look good then they are by health reasons.

However, there’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting both. And to truly look good and be healthy, you can’t JUST lose weight. Thin, flabby, wobbly, and easily out of breath is neither an attractive nor healthy state of being.

So you need to exercise regularly while you are losing weight.

Now, here’s the problem with crash diets and exercise: they end up being mutually exclusive. Nearly impossible to do at the same time.

Most diets call for a drastic reduction in calories. This will leave you feeling exhausted and it will be very hard for you to summon up the energy to exercise.

This is especially true if you are on a low carbohydrate diet.

After all, what do athletes eat right before a marathon or any other endurance type sport, where they will need energy and stamina? That’s right, they eat carbohydrates.

When you exercise, your body needs to be able to immediately access carbohydrates to burn for energy. The body burns carbohydrates as fuel for the first 20 minutes of exercise before it starts accessing your fat stores, according to The Physician And Sports Medicine Journal.

If you are on a low carbohydrate diet, believe me, you will not even last that 20 minutes to get to that fat burning zone. You will not have the energy.

To be able to last that 20 minutes, you would need to eat complex carbohydrates. We’re not saying that you should scarf down a candy bar or donut right before exercise; those are simple carbohydrates that are metabolized very quickly and send your blood sugar shooting up and then crashing down.

Most athletes or even people who are just going for a jog or bike ride benefit if they eat something like a granola bar or a piece of fruit an hour or two before exercising. Those carbohydrates slowly release energy and sustain you so that you can exercise longer.

So when you consider a weight loss method, you are going to want to pick one where you will have enough energy to exercise as you lose weight.

Avoiding Diet Shortcuts

We all want to lose weight and lose it quickly, but there are healthy ways to do it and unhealthy ways.

The fact that a product is being sold on a pharmacy shelf, or written about on the internet, does not mean that it is safe and healthy.

Here are some diet shortcuts that are decidedly dangerous and should be avoided if you value your health.

1.) Diet Pills. They are a short term fix only. Once you stop taking them, you will be hungry again and will go back to your normal eating patterns, which means you will regain all of your weight. They are not well regulated by the FDA and their diuretic effects can cause you to become dangerously dehydrated, especially in the summer. Their side effects can also include headaches, dizziness, nausea, and heart palpitations.

2.) Health food fads like ephedra. “Herbal” and “all-natural” does not mean safe. Deadly Nightshade is all natural. So is rattlesnake venom. Ephedra has been tied to a number of deaths, and is now banned for sale in the United States. Don’t assume that because a diet supplement is being sold at the grocery store, it’s healthy.

3.) Fasting. Fasting quickly sends your body into starvation mode, and your metabolism slows down so that when you start eating again you will be astonished at how fast the pounds pile back on. And it may take a long time for your metabolism to return to normal again. Fasting also causes your body to start burning muscle for fuel; you don’t want less muscle, you want more! Long term fasting can cause serious health damage. Your heart is a muscle, and your body does not differentiate between what types of muscle tissue it raids for fuel.

4.) Fad Diets.Trendy diets come and go. The Scarsdale Diet and the Atkins diet are a couple of examples. Although those diets aren’t good for you, because of their heavy reliance on protein, they are not as bad as diets like the grapefruit diet, or the cabbage soup diet. The problem with all of these diets is that they often rely heavily on changing your diet in an unnatural way and consuming mostly one kind of food, which does not give you the variety of nutrients that you need and which are impossible to follow long term.

5.) Eating prepackaged diet foods. Yes, they are convenient, but these meals are surprisingly high in sodium and fat. Sodium contributes to high blood pressure, and people who are overweight are already at risk for high blood pressure. The American Heart Association recommends not exceeding 2000 mgs of sodium a day, but many prepackaged diet foods contain that much in a single meal.

The Secrets of Losing Weight And Keeping It Off

Why do some dieters suffer the endless frustration of losing and then gaining weight again and again, while others lose weight and keep it off forever?

And wouldn’t you like to belong to the latter group instead of the former?

Here are some surprisingly easy things that successful dieters do - and you can easily adapt these good habits yourself.

1.) You know that old conventional wisdom that goes “The scale doesn’t matter when you’re dieting”? For a long time experts scorned the idea of frequent weigh ins, pointing out that the scale can be inaccurate because of fluctuations caused by water weight.

However, it turns out that weighing yourself every day is actually an excellent motivator for dieters. A study in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine found that dieters who weighed themselves every day lost the most weight, and kept it off more successfully, compared to a group of dieters who did not weigh themselves regularly.

2.) Write down everything that you eat. The mere act of writing down everything that you eat is a motivator that helps keep you on track and makes you less likely to binge, fitness experts say.

3.) Find an exercise that you like, even if it’s just taking your dog for a mile long walk, or bicycling, or tennis - and do it at least a few times a week. It will speed up your weight loss, make you healthier, and dieters who also exercise are the most successful at keeping the weight off.

4.) Plan ahead. If you are going out to dinner with friends or to a holiday office party or even to the movies, what are you going to do when hunger pangs hit? Make sure that you’ve eaten a filling, non fattening snack or meal beforehand and decide what, if anything, you will eat at the party, movies, or whatever, before you go.

5.) Schedule the occasional indulgence. If you know that you get to eat a small ice cream sundae once a week, or one brownie, or half a cup of pasta, or whatever you are craving, you are much less likely to binge. You can also make sure that’s a day when you add in some extra exercise.

Why Low Calorie Diets Don’t Work

If our bodies need to burn a certain number of calories to maintain our body weight, then it should be easy to lose weight, shouldn’t it?

Common sense would say that all we have to do is slash the number of calories that we consume.

Unfortunately there are a lot of studies that show that this does not work long term. A study published in the American Journal of Nutrition, for instance, showed that a group of individuals on a low calorie diet, who lost an average of 26 percent of their body weight during the course of the study, were not able to keep that weight off.

EVERYONE in the study regained almost 75 percent of their lost weight within three years of completing the study. And many studies show even worse results than that.

If weight loss were as simple as “consume no more than 1000 calories a day” or “consume no more than 1500 calories a day” then everybody would be skinny.

There are a number of reasons why a low calorie diet won’t lead to long term weight loss.

Part of it has to do with biology and how our ancestors evolved to survive the feast and famine lifestyle.

We need a certain amount of calories to stay alive. Since humans and other animals evolved in the days when we had to hunt and gather our food, and food supplies were never predictable, our bodies developed in a way that allows us to survive times of famine.

When little or no food is available, our metabolism simply slows down and we burn less calories. Unfortunately this is just one of the many survival mechanisms that our bodies developed that worked to keep us alive thousands of years ago, but that don’t work so well in the modern world where there’s a Dunkin Donuts on every corner.

Our natural tendencies to crave foods that are bad for us, like fat and sweets - foods that would help us survive a famine thousands of years ago but now just pile on more fat cells - don’t help much either.

A study in the Journal of American Medicine showed that a group of people put on a very low calorie diet experienced a 20 percent decline in their metabolism in the first month and their metabolism continued to fall for three months straight after that.

What a nightmare! Going on a low calorie diet means that you have to eat less....and less...and less...in order to lose weight, and you will very quickly reach a point where you are struggling simply to maintain your weight.

Every dieter out there who has ever struggled to lose weight by drastically cutting calories knows this is true.

The first few days or even the first week or two of the diet, the weight crashes off. You’re constantly starving and can’t concentrate because you’re so hungry and you’re irritable and dizzy, but hey, at least the weight is falling away, right?

But unfortunately, that doesn’t last very long. The weight loss slows down, and then it stops. No matter how much you starve yourself you’re seeing no reward.

That’s the other reason that low calorie diets fail - because most people can’t last very long on a diet where they are constantly starving.

And if you start eating normally - if you even start increasing your calories a little bit...the pounds come piling back on, undoing all of your hard work.

This sounds like terribly discouraging news, but it really doesn’t need to be. It simply means that low calorie diets do not work well for maintaining weight loss.

In fact, it’s good news - it means that you never have to starve yourself again! Instead, you need to select a healthy diet that has been proven to work and that allows you to eat a normal amount of food every day.

Five Surprising, And Safe! Metabolism Boosters

You already know that exercise boosts your metabolism, of course. And we can not recommend highly enough that you do some type of aerobic activity every day, even if it’s just walking up a few flights of stairs a few times a day at work, or taking a brisk walk on your lunch hour. If you do aerobic exercise, your metabolism remains higher for up to eight hours after you finish exercising!

And if you exercise enough to put on more muscle, so much the better. Building up muscle can boost your metabolism by ten percent or more, which will generally mean you can eat a few hundred more calories a day.

But when you’re dieting you need all of the help that you can get, so here are some ways to boost that metabolism and burn those calories off faster.

1.) Magnesium: Magnesium is necessary to keep your metabolism functioning properly. If you are not getting enough magnesium in your diet, your metabolism may slow down. (When you buy vitamin supplements, never take more than the recommended dose, however!)

2.) Vitamin B is another vitamin that is essential for boosting your metabolism. B-12 in particular is known to give an energy boost and increase your metabolic rte.

3.) Spicy foods. Studies show that eating foods containing ingredients like black pepper, ginger, and chili peppers can boost your metabolism by as much as 8 percent for several hours after you eat them!

4.) Green Tea not only boosts your metabolism, studies show that it has health benefits including acting as an anti-oxidant and protecting against heart disease.

5.) Water. Dehydration causes your metabolism to slow down. Even mild dehydration can cause your metabolism to slow down as much as three percent, in much the same way that cutting back on calories does. When your body is deprived of water it slows down all of its metabolic functions. Drinking water not only fills you up, it keeps your metabolism functioning efficiently.

Rapid Weight Loss Techniques

Other than physical appearance weight affects a person in many ways. This includes the overall quality of life, self-esteem, depression, health risks, and physical

capabilities. There are a lot of positive changes that take place when a person experiences weight loss. It is for this reason a lot of people are searching for a weight loss

technique that will surely trim down that fat and get them a healthier body.

The first thing that an over-weight person should do is seek a doctor's advice in choosing a suitable weight loss regimen. This should be done after a full physical

examination, leading to a determination of proper weight loss technique. To lose weight fast and effectively, four aspects of life should be changed: what to eat, how to eat,

behavior and level of physical activity.

Here are fast tips that can change help to make needed changes:

First: Rapid and successful weight loss involves a multi-faceted technique that consists of mindset, exercise, and some cases, diet supplements. Begin by finding a diet

plan that you allows you to easily incorporate necessary dietary changes into your life. Then find a safe and suitable exercise plan that allows at least thirty minutes of

physical activity each day like brisk walking, running, swimming, or dancing.

Second: Set realistic goals. Rome wasn't built in a day, and you didn't gain all your weight at one time, but you did so gradually. You'll have to focus on losing it the same

way even when your desire is to lose weight quickly. The ability to focus with proper mindset enables you to lose weight more efficiently, and sometimes more quickly. With

discipline and proper mind set, a dieter will avoid becoming discouraged and losing focus.

Third: Listen as your body speaks. Each and everyone's metabolism reacts differently to different weight loss programs and plans. If one weight loss plan isn't working for

you, investigate to discover as best you can the reason why, then if needed try substituting another, more suitable program to better match your body's reaction. The

exercise program you select must also be suitable to you with regard to your level of physical fitness and your capabilities. Not everyone is as capable as the next person in

the beginning, or are able to exercise as rigorously as others can. If walking is all that can be done, then walk for this is proven the best exercise. Muscles burn more

calories than fatty tissues, so it's also best to put on a little muscle too.

Fourth: Eat more fiber. It makes a person full sooner, and stays in the tummy longer, and slows down the rate of digestion. A single serving of whole grain bread moves fat

through the digestive system faster. Grains turn into blood sugar that spikes the body's insulin level. Thus, making the body more energized and ready to tell the body

when it should stop burning fats or start storing.

Fifth: Keep away from fried foods, especially deep-fried, as they contain enormous amounts of fat and cholesterol. Although fish and chicken appear leaner than beef, this

white meat can contain more fat than beef when fried. Grilling food is recommended, as grilled food contains less fat after the food is cooked.

Sixth: Takes lots of fluid. While drinking at least six to eight glasses of water a day is no longer the rule, drinking plenty of water keeps the body refreshed and its systems

working properly. Since weight loss depends greatly on how the body processes food and eliminates wastes, the body must stay hydrated.

All in all, discipline and consistency is still the best practice and the key to a rapid weight loss success. Proper diet and meal portions, as well as physical activity, applied

consistently everyday will result in faster weight loss and more effective weight loss, as opposed to experiencing a dramatic loss, only to be followed by a return to old

habits, dieting failure and increased weight gain.