The Dangers of Dieting
October 17, 2011, By Avery Hurt 0 comments
There comes a time in almost everyone’s life when he looks in the mirror or down at the zipper straining to meet on a pair of jeans that used to fit just fine, and he says to himself: “I’m going to go on a diet and shed a few of these extra pounds.” That may be a plan that wants a little re-thinking.
Experts argue the various merits and risks of the plethora of fad diets out there. Many fear that Atkins and South Beach may be hard on the heart, while on the other hand, high-carb diets can make glucose control difficult, and some diets—such as the blood type diet or the cabbage soup diet—are just plain weird. But all this discussion about which diet is likely to be most effective and which is likely to cause you to keel over from a heart attack or develop diabetes may be moot. More and more nutritionists seem to agree that if you want to lose weight for the long term the worst thing you can do is go on a diet—any diet.
The Body Fights Back
If you are overweight, losing that extra weight is a good idea. However, going on a diet may actually interfere with the plan, at least in the long run. I hear this message again and again from nutritionists I interview. In order for any diet to work, it has to cut calories in one form or another and many often exclude or drastically limit entire food groups (low-carb diets, for example). Limiting food groups for a short time may not do irreversible damage to your system, but these diets aren’t sustainable, and aren’t meant to be. The idea is to jump-start weight loss, drop a bunch of pounds in time for swimsuit season or the class reunion and then go on the “maintenance phase” of the program.
This plan sounds good in theory, but in practice it actually backfires. Here’s what happens: When you sharply cut calories or tinker with the balance of nutrients in your diet, your body responds by changing the way it processes the calories you are taking in.
For example when your body begins getting far fewer calories than it is used to, it lowers its metabolism, slowing down basic physiological processes, so that it takes fewer calories to do the basic work of running your body, making losing weight more challenging after the first few days or weeks on the diet. In addition when your body gets signals that there is not enough food coming in, it thinks you may be facing a food shortage, and starts stockpiling fat, just in case. This can actually happen even when you just skip meals or go too long between meals.
When the body is not getting enough calories, it starts to consume muscle for fuel. In addition to lifting heavy things, muscles burn calories. So when you lose muscle, you burn fewer calories. After a drastic weight-loss diet, you have fewer muscles to burn calories, so more calories are stored as fat. And then when you get off the diet and back to normal eating, your body continues to play it safe and store more of your calories as fat, just in case you get a crazy idea to try this stunt again.
The more diets you go on, the more the body responds this way—apparently your food source is dicey, so the body had better keep plenty of fat in reserve. Each time around the diet block, the harder it is to get back to a point where your body burns calories efficiently and doesn’t hoard fat against hard times. So the more you diet, the less-efficient your body becomes.
NEXT: So How to Lose?
