I see all around that people are in search of diet advice from so called diet doctor or dietitian. These diet doctors prescribe certain fancy diet plans (crash diets) to gain or lose weight quickly. People also follow the diet plan religiously, actually people like hard to do diet plan in the beginning. If the dietitian throws words like keto diet, diet with no carbs, or fat free diet, cholesterol free diet etc. then people tend to get impressed by the dietitians advice. People associate the diet lingo with the competence of the dietitian and effectiveness of the prescribed diet. If a dietitian didn't use the healthy diet lingo then her will be perceived as lame or ineffective.
It is usual perception that if something is hard to do then the rewards you get after doing it must be great. Well, such a perception may have developed from our ancestors living in the jungle, because in the jungle, food won't get home delivered, you have to hunt for food, kill it, or gather it or dig it out, sometimes you have to cook it so that you can eat it. Also the food our ancestors had this way made a good healthy nutritious diet. Hence our ancestors were all healthy, if they weren't healthy then they would have died prematurely and we wouldn't have gotten a chance to come in to existence in this world.
Anyways, coming back to our topic, we think radical diets are more effective. Therefore when a dietitian or so called diet doctor when prescribes a crash diet in the name of healthy diet, we religiously follow it. We even brag about our diet plan with friends and family, we even advertise our diet plan on social media.
So the bottom line is we follow our diet plan thinking is a healthy diet plan, most of the people following such a crash diet plan also achieve their goals, some even overshoot their goals, they happily share their success story with friends, family and social groups. But what's next? That is the big question.
Then after that they slowly the enthusiasm diminishes and everything reverts back or rather overshoot the origional condition. Most of us wonder, Why this happens?
While having this so called healthy diet we forget one thing, i.e. adaptive mechanism of our body. When our ancestors lived in jungle they were dependant on nature's whim. Some times they used to get abundant food, while at other times they couldn't get enough food. So to survive such cycles of abundant food and less food their bodies developed an adaptive mechanism. This adaptive mechanism made them eat more foods when food was available in abundance and store it in the body in the form of fats, thereby increasing the body weight (becoming fat). Whenever there was shortage of food, their bodies used this stored supply of energy in the form of fats. Lost bodyweight and became thin in the process. Then again when body for abundant nutrition it quickly started building the energy stores (fats) to prepare for the next round of starving.
Now what the diet doctors do is, they design a low calorie diet, that is the person taking this low calorie diet don't get enough calories (energy) from the diet so his body starts using the reserve energy (the calories stored in the form of fats), so his body weight goes on decreasing. Our body also have another secret weapon to fight starving, it simply reduces the energy expenditure of the body. In simple words our body slows down chemical processes going on in the body so as to conserve the energy. Hence when a person starts a low calorie diet, first he loses weight quickly but then his body starts reducing its energy expenditure and then the rate of weight loss reduces. So it's easy to lose weight at the start of a crash diet but hard to lose afterwords.
So you have lost at least some of your body weight, it's better than nothing right?
Hold on, the real problem is coming next. What happens after this round of starving is, our body prepares itself for next round of such crash diet (starving). It starts encouraging us to eat more and replanish it's energy reserves as quickly as possible, it also does some over provisioning. Because our body wants to survive any draught (starving). Because of this over provisioning our body weight overshoots the figure it previously had. Not what what we wished for right?
Same thing happens if you want to gain weight. (That is if one is a skinny person, or body builder wants to put on muscle mass.) The person temporary gains weight and then when the efforts diminish, the body regains is original condition.
Then the question arises, is there any way to lose or gain weight? And the easy one? The answer is YES there is and it is up to you how easy you make it.
In most cases the reason of overweight or underweight it bad diet. So one has to follow a base diet (the regular diet), modify it to their own body and taste needs, that is eating more proteins and less carbs. Modify your diet in such a way that it is easy for you to follow for a long time. Don't include any fancy or costly stuff that is hard to get. People actually get infatuated by hard to get things, don't fall pray to this tendency. Once you formulate your healthy diet, continue it, modify it according to your taste. Diet is a continual process. You have to rebalance it, balancing means you have to adjust the ratio of different nutrients in it. Don't get discouraged, you will always find tasty, healthy and pocket friendly alternative. You can always improve. Just keep in mind some simple rules while designing your diet like- less carbohydrates, more protein, occasional fasting. Intermittent fasting is good for body, that is why fasting is included in every religion on this planet. And yes you must have cheat days included too.
That's it for now..
Sumit
The POWER is when,
you use ODDS
to get EVEN..
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