Dieting - Friend or Foe.

Over the years I have tried every diet known to man, some extremely unpleasant and others that actually made me put on more weight.

Well known diets such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig offer sensible healthy plans that help you lose weight, but they’re expensive. Also what happens once you finish the plan? Do you go cold turkey, because that will probably end with you bathing in a pool of pudding.

During one of my efforts to diet, I was told to restrict my calorie intake to 1,100 a day. In practise I found out that it wasn’t difficult to do this, but just look at the figures. The recommended healthy daily intake for a woman my age is about 2,200 calories, so I was consuming only half of this. The classification of starvation is consuming less than 900 calories a day. Look how close that is! By following this diet I was virtually starving myself, it wasn’t healthy and it wasn’t ever going to work.

Some studies have also shown that crash dieting causes an increase in premature mortality.

Dieting has also been proven to do the opposite than it says on the tin. Dieting can slow down your metabolism by up to 20%. This is your body’s natural response to starvation; it begins to use the small amount of food that you are consuming more efficiently. This means that it is preserving any fat restores in your body, making it more difficult to shift. Because of this increase in efficiency your body won’t need as many calories to function, meaning that once you stop dieting the weight will start piling on.

Don’t even get me started on miracle pills. Raspberry Ketone, Colon Cleanse, Acai Berry...not only do they sound awful but they are massive scams.

Instead of temporarily changing what you eat just so you can look good in that swimsuit, look towards adjusting your lifestyle on a permanent basis.

Don’t worry about paying stupid amounts for a gym membership, walk to work every day rather than taking the car. Buy semi-skimmed or 1% milk rather than whole milk and swap that glass of wine for some water. It all adds up and isn’t even that difficult.

The only way that you are going to lose/keep off the pounds is to build a healthy relationship with food. Don’t completely cut things out, because soon enough you will break and go on a binge. If you are not happy then no amount of dieting or exercise is going to fix your problems.

While I’m writing this I am munching on a piece of Easter Egg, It’s not a horrific amount and yes it may contain more calories than a grape but I don’t want a grape...I want chocolate and to be honest, it's really that simple.