Is your diet making you fat? Probably!
First, let’s talk about what constitutes a diet.
Some possibilities: Eating according to a highly recommended meal plan rather than one of your own creation and choosing (i.e. any prepackaged meal system or plan outlined as part of a fitness craze); eating to the exclusion of certain foods (i.e. low-carbohydrate diet); eating to “cleanse” your body (i.e. detox diet); eating in a way that sucks the time, energy, and life out of your day (any diet.)
True, sometimes pieces of these plans make great nutritional sense. i.e. If a diet encourages you to eat more whole grains in place of sweets, that’s probably sound advice. However, you’re not likely to get to the point of choosing consistently nutritious foods if you feel deprived in any way along the way, which is how most diets make you feel.
Bottomline: If what you’re currently eating feels like a diet, well, then, it probably is.
Now, what’s the harm in dieting?
- Dieting causes stress, which triggers your body to increase cortisol as well as insulin production. Cortisol encourages you to store fat, making any weight loss attempt harder, while too much insulin makes you incessantly hungry.
- Dieting reprograms your brain to respond to successive stressful situations by eating.
- Diets not only fail; in up to two-thirds of all cases, they actually cause you to gain even more weight!
- Dieting is self-torture and you were created for so much more than that.
So there you have it: Three highly scientific, and one common sense reason to stop dieting. What are your reasons?
