Crash Diets Versus Healthy Diets

Fad diets have been around for well over a century, Simon Lovell from www.thelunchboxdiet.com explains why it's important to take a healthy approach that you can stick to.

From the very first documented diet by Lord Byron in 1820 involving vinegar and water all the way to the maple syrup diet of today. We’ve tried eating grapefruit to in every meal, dined on caribou, raw fish and whale blubber for the Inuit diet, and made ourselves enjoy cabbage soup.

There’s a commonality in most fad diets that tie them all together. Whatever the smoke screen, the reason the diet really works is always the same. Having nothing but liquid or having grapefruit with every meal sounds different, but these are the gimmicks. The gimmicks cover up the true means by which the dieter loses weight: crash dieting!

Here it is folks in a nutshell. What you eat (calories in) must equal what goes out (expenditure) in order to maintain weight. Caloric requirements vary from person to person depending on age, sex and activity level because expenditure varies from person to person depending on age, sex and activity level. When you starve the body of calories, you lose weight. But there’s another factor that the crash diets fall short in. Metabolism! Metabolism is the rate by which our bodies burn calories and convert them to fuel for all of our bodies’ functions: the higher the metabolism, the higher the rate at which you burn calories. When you starve the body, you lower metabolism because your body conserves as much energy as possible. It isn’t getting what it needs and therefore, it tries to keep it longer. When this happens, the next time you attempt to lose weight, it becomes even harder.

That’s one of the reasons it’s better to stay away from crash diets and follow a healthy diet: it keeps your metabolism at optimum rate – high!

Another reason to follow a healthy diet rather than a crash diet is because a crash diet robs your body of nutrients. When your body is being robbed of nutrients, it doesn’t work as well. Your body succumbs to illness and fatigue. The things you could be doing to make your body stronger become more and more difficult.

Learning to eat healthfully isn’t as difficult as one might think. Learning to eat healthfully and still lose weight is a little trickier, but it can be accomplished. We just need to train our bodies. We’ve all been trained to eat a certain way. Many of our parents knew enough to make us eat our veggies and drink all of our milk. They knew that too much “sugar” wasn’t good for us, but what they defined as sugar is different than how we look at it today. To them, sugar meant all the obvious stuff: sweets, cookies, pies, cakes. We know better today and realize that breads and crackers made from refined carbohydrates really don’t offer us much more than the junk, yet they still add unnecessary calories to our diets. Wait a minute! Am I trying to sell you on the idea of a low carbohydrate diet? Not necessarily. Stay with me.

Remember, we are talking about healthful eating and losing weight. Crash diets cut too many calories and don’t train your body to eat properly. I want you to eat enough so that your body gets all its requirements, yet not so much that you can’t lose weight. Remember when we talked about calories in vs. calories out? Well, if you are going to put out a lot of calories per day, let’s say you live an active lifestyle that includes at least 30-40 minutes of exercise a day, then you are allowed more calories. You can eat quite a few carbohydrates and still lose weight. But if your life is more sedentary, meaning you don’t get a lot of physical activity most days, then you simply can’t eat as much if you want to lose weight or even maintain without gaining weight. The food you do eat must still meet your daily nutritional requirements. Quite simply, there just isn’t room for carbohydrates that only offer calories (energy) and very few vitamins and minerals, no protein (or very little), and no fiber.

It’s kind of like this. If you made a substantial income per month, you’d spend it differently than if you earned a meager income, right?

A lot of income buys you extras. A lower income just pays the bills. You need to train your body to eat what will offer you plenty of nutrition (pay the bills), yet doesn’t pack on the pounds. Likewise, working out is sort of like earning money. The more you work out, the more calories you’re allowed. Makes you want to go to the gym, right? The great news is that in The Lunchbox Diet, I’ve done all the work for you. You don’t need to count calories or carb grams. It’s set up in such a way that you are eating healthfully, losing weight in a healthy manner and training your body to eat right for life.

Just remember to stay away from the crash diets and try a more healthful approach that will train your body to eat right. Crash diets are here to stay and will change as quickly as any other fad. Think about it this way, crash diets are like parachute pants whereas healthful eating is like good old blue jeans. Which ones do you still love to wear?

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