The Hard Truth About Dieting (Part 1)

These days when I hear the word “Diet” I think of bold claims of losing 30 pounds in 30 days, strict meal plans, eating specific food groups, and counting calories.

Most of the time people only diet to lose weight which is completely fine, so long you're alright with gaining back that weight the second you get off that diet and if you don't believe me keep reading.

The truth about dieting is that it only works in the short term and is extremely restrictive. If you have tried to lose weight in the past you most likely have tried at least one diet. Now I want you to ask yourself these two questions: how do you feel being on that diet and two are you still on that diet.

If your answer to the first question was stressful or restrictive then your answer to the second will most likely be no.

What people don't realize is that most diets are unsustainable and if you think otherwise then you must be willing to be on a VERY strict diet for the rest of your life, I mean how bad can it be.

Most mainstream diets are marketed as this one ultimate solution to fat loss and general fitness, However, this isn't true, diets only change two things in your life: what food you eat and how much of that food you eat. What you eat is very important, but it’s only one part of a healthy lifestyle.

Dieting alone can’t fix all your health issues and the nature of most diet has some serious health implications. I'll be exploring some of the main issues and problems with dieting and the lesser know difficulties of this approach to weight loss.

For the sake of clarity, all the information presented is NOT solely opinion-based. If you feel that something mentioned is not true or factual do your research comment below.

So with that said, let's dive into little truths and details you might have overlooked when you think about dieting.

1. Side-Effects Are Common Place

In life, everything has side effects and diets are no exception, although fitness influencers want you to think otherwise. These side-effects could be range from manageable to unbearable, it all depends on what diet you’re on.

For a start let's take a look at the Paleo diet, you can expect to deal with the following: bad breath, elevated LDL cholesterol, and low blood sugar, just to name a few.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the Paleo diet, it is a diet based on types of food thought to have been eaten by early humans and would exclude foods not available during that period. Such foods would include processed food, trans-fats, soft drink, dairy products, grains, legumes, vegetable oils, and butter.

Removing processed foods from your diet is always a good idea, but removes healthy protein sources like legumes isn't. One of the reasons diets have side effects is that they exclude foods that might be healthy because they don't fall under the very specific list of foods you are allowed to eat.

Doing this could lead to certain health issues in some individuals and can even lead to you missing out on some great nutrients your body needs, therefore cause particularly significant health problems.

None of this is to say that diets are all side-effects because the Paleo diet can help you stop eating junk food and most unhealthy processed foods. I simply to make it clear to you that if you're going to do any of these diets you're going to deal with all that comes with them.

2. Their Marketing Lies To You

I’ll want you to understand that the food and fitness industries promote diets and certain products for-profit and they will say anything to sell them.

Now there is nothing wrong with promoting a product that can help solve a problem or issue, but it’s a different story when they start pushing things that have no benefit to the consumer.

I want to give two examples of this phenomenon so that you can understand this a bit more clearly.

I’ll start with the food industry. Let’s say you’re on a low-fat diet so that you can lose weight and you’re walking down an aisle in the supermarket and you see a cup of yogurt labeled “fat-free” and you assume it’s healthy, well it’s not.

You see when food manufacturers reduce the fat content in a particular product they simply jack-up the sugar content intend to give it a sweet taste.

Normally you shouldn’t be afraid of dietary fats, but sugar or more specifically fructose is the real danger here. In reality, low-fat or fat-free foods can even more unhealthy than whatever your diet of choice says is “Bad food.” (more on that later).

Next is the fitness industry and detoxing (I’m gonna have fun with this). For the lucky few who are trying to lose weight and haven’t tried detoxing let me explain this scientifically debunked health and fitness concept.

Detoxes are products that promise to help clear out harmful “Toxins” that get into our body because of the food in our diets and make us healthy, this is a myth.

If you have a functioning liver, kidneys, and lungs then you don’t need to worry about toxins.

This stuff is marketed to people as a quick way to be healthier and possibly lose weight by removing chemicals and toxins from our bodies.

The truth is anything can be considered a toxin if you have too much of it in your body.

3. They’re Hard To Maintain Long-Term

Whether you like it or not dieting for a long time is not in any way easy, although it is still marketed as easy and quick.

Think about eating what you may not particularly enjoy for years just so you can lose weight sounds like torture. Even if you are eating what you enjoy you might have to deal with very time eating schedules and portion sizes.

The mean problem I see here is the fact that dieting is normally willpower intensive.

This means that you constantly have to fight the urge to eat certain foods, which is something we all have to deal with, but not on the same scale as people who are on a diet.

We all drink and eat stuff that is not particularly healthy every once in a while and we think nothing of it because it normally doesn’t matter in the long run and our diet is very flexible.

As for people who diet, any slight deviation in that strict meal plan may lead them down a very slippery slope, although this doesn’t happen all the time.

The very idea that you can only lose weight on a precise meal plan can affect a person. This leads one to think that can’t lose fat without a very strict diet plan and when they don't lose weight on this diet they move on to the next and the cycle repeats itself.

Only dieting to lose weight most often at times is a horrible idea, not because you won't lose weight but because you will gain all that weight back again when you stop that diet.

4. It Isn't the Only Way

When it comes to burning fat no one burns it at the same speed. For your body to burn fat it needs to use use it as energy. Muscles are great at doing this and can burn energy for sometime after you stop using them.

Simply eating different foods, less food or “Super Foods” isn’t going to make you lose weight long-term.

Losing weight is a multi-step process and requires a lot more effort than just eating differently. You’re going to need to be able to burn that excess fat by using it as energy.

There are plenty of things you can do to burn energy like resistance training, calisthenics, and even cardio.

Out of the there I just mentioned cardio burn the least amount of energy and is far more time-consuming.

Resistance training and calisthenics are quite similar in how they burn energy.

The reason these activities burn fat is that your muscles use it as fuel. The more muscle mass you have and the more you use them, the more fat you burn.

Although your body needs protein, nutrients and good sleep to build bigger and stronger muscle.

For some, the process could take longer than expected so I recommend that you take supplements like CRAZYBULK to help facilitate the process.

You can CLICK HERE to get some supplement for yourself and make the process of building muscles easier and quicker.

5. Result Don't Apply To Everyone

As most of us are already aware, everyone is different and reacts to things differently. This is a fact of life but it is completely disregarded when it comes to dieting.

As much as fitness gurus want you to think that the diet they promote is the key to all weight problems that are simply not true. Let us take a logical view on this subject.

Let's say there was a magical, supreme and universal diet that makes you lost fat in 30 days, this diet would become public knowledge in a few months or years at most after it's discovery and even if this doesn't happen the diet would be secret and would only be available to people with the money or influence to access it, not some random fitness Youtuber.

In the unlikely chance that such a diet exists it would mean that no one could properly lose weight or get shredded without it. This would mean that people who don't have access to the food listed in this diet would never have a six-pack.

Diets are simply a simplified and generalized meal plan which is supposed to help people lose weight and live generally healthier lives.

Some diets might be useful to some people and useless to others, however, these diets are marketed as this quick fix for everyone. This sort of thinking disregards the fact that everyone reacts to food in different ways.

People think just because one of their friends lost a few bounds on some weird diet that they can do it too and that diet is the ultimate way to lose weight.

Then when this new, never before seen diet doesn’t work they move on to the next one and the one after that. they don't see results they get frustrated and try another diet they hear from their aunt.

Something people need to understand about food is that everyone processes it differently. Even when it comes to calories, 100 calories doughnut isn't 100 calories for some me or someone else.

6. It Takes A Lot of Time To See Results

When it comes to diet you will not see reasonable any results in the week or month and that is completely natural, although fitness gurus say the exact opposite because their 30-day abs workout is "100% GUARANTEED" to give you a rocking six-pack.

This issue most people on these diets face is that they get worried when they don't see the result in just one month and they normally don’t see any significant result in two to three months, but most people can’t wait that long.

What you need to understand about rapid weight loss is a bad thing. Think about this: say you lose 5 pounds of body weight in the first week you're most likely not losing only fat but bone density, water weight, and muscle mass.

A common myth in the fitness community is being able to lose fat in a specific area, which is simply impossible from a scientific perspective. For your body to burn fat, it must enter ketosis – which takes time.

Your body isn't particularly picky when it wants to burn fat. Doing a lot of ab workouts doesn't mean you are burning fat in that area, it means you are building the muscles in that area and muscles burn energy.

Here are three things you need to understand about muscles; They get stronger the more you use them, they are very good at burning calories when you put them to use and you can’t lose them even if you stop going to the gym for a long time.