The ‘egg diet’, the Atkins diet, the ‘carrot diet’, the ‘low-carb diet’, the ‘I only eating in the morning diet’, the ‘500 calories a day diet’; none of them work because none of them are sustainable. Of course you’ll lose weight, but you’ll regain it really fast if you don’t make a real life change. Let’s see why.
One of the main issues is that restrictive diets aren’t nutritional; you actually starve your body as it doesn’t get enough nutrients, protein and fat. Also if you don’t eat when your body is screaming that it’s hungry, it goes in ‘survival mode’. What does that mean? Your metabolism slows down to conserve energy; everything you eat will be stored as fat, and your body starts to burn muscle tissue. And trust me, you don’t want your metabolism to slow down, you want it to be fast!
So let’s say you’ve lost the 7 kilos you needed to get in to your bikini (or into your speedo’s) for the summer. So far so good, it wasn’t that hard after all. But then what? You might go back to your regular diet or even worse, you might binge on all the foods you’d deprived yourself of for a few months. At least that’s what I used to do, as if I needed some kind of a reward after losing weight. I had restricted myself so much I felt I could eat anything I wanted. Wrong. Once your metabolism is much slower, you can’t go back to eating the same amounts of food, you can’t just go back to your pre-diet diet. You’ll put on even more weight, faster than you lost it in the first place.
Then, you have the psychological factor. Diets make you miserable, don’t they? All you can think of is what you can’t eat anymore. ‘Oh no I can’t eat pizza’, ‘Oh no I can’t have cake’, ‘Oh no that’s too many calories’, and so on. When I was on a diet, food was a constant worry, I had to be in control of my intake all the time which created stress and frustration. I bet I’m not the only one who has experienced these feelings. It’s a permanent mental battle, and you’ve lost it before you’ve even started.
So what do you need to do? A long-term life change! Just start by eating healthily, eat clean!
