Fad Diets - Are They Fuelling A Quick Fix Society?

The Diet Industry. This is a multi million pound industry How much money do you think you have spent on diets, pills, specific diet meals and courses? Hundreds, maybe thousands? Have any of them worked for you long term? The diet industry has made fortunes out of turning the very simple basics of weight loss into a complete mystery of selling various pills and compounds or selling you processed meals which cost more than preparing them yourself. The seems to have been a mysterious vale brought up around dieting when in fact it really is very simple indeed. The only difficult part of changing your body shape and body fat levels is knowing what works for you and how to find out. Also, long term many diets are not sustainable which can cause repeated severe dieting and sometimes gaining more weight than you started off with! The Secret? There isn’t a secret. Its just about understanding your own system and how to tweak it to lose weight.. 30 or 40 yeas ago, we didn’t have the convenience we have now and generally people were a lot more active. Shops were not as close, more people had to walk, less computer systems and entertainment involved having to go out. We pretty much had to make our own entertainment and there were less home based activities. Having a car was not as common as it is now. Everyone now has a car and the people who cant drive are few and far between. Our food was better; there was less processed food and more cooked from scratch with natural produce. A lot of the food was locally produced (especially where I was brought up in Belfast where at that time a Kiwi fruit was thought of as highly exotic!) Pre cooked and processed convenience food was more of a luxury than an every day occurrence Many companies sprang up and began to offer potions, pills and diet solutions, some of them effective, some of them not so effective but very few of them actually offering a long term solution to managing your weight. It was about short term weight loss and not designed and your own body. Where would the profit be in giving people a solution long term and not giving them repeat business? The way the industry seems to be working at the moment is either absolutely no information and they hold the key to the secret OR they give you apparently lots of information, just not quite enough to be able to do it yourself but will sell you all the meals, or give you all the information based on “normal” people, not us lot that apparently have to fight like hell to lose it and keep it off. Many of the diets which are around are based on short term fast solutions which don’t keep the weight off long term. Its all part of the quick fix society we seem to have grown into and the “want it now” culture. It doesn’t have to be like that – its simple and easy AND you know what, the less you stress about it better the results you will get long term. Even apart from what I have written in my book Rebel Diet, you will probably by now know certain things that do work for you or you respond well to. They may work in a minor way long term or possibly work short term for you but doesn’t seem to work on a long term basis. One piece of advice I can give you is that when you find something you respond well to, you can incorporate it into the regime in the book in some way AND USE IT! IT will be an indicator at some level of what you respond to and you are on your way to recognizing the signals which get you closer to understanding what your body needs and when. So, when you see a new fad diet which claims to have miraculous results by taking out essential elements which assist us in staying healthy put a question mark over it. When you see a new slimming drug, put another question mark over it and ask yourself, what can I do to get to know my own system and understand how it works and walk away from the diet industry for good? Free yourself from diet hell, turn your back on the pills potions and extreme diets and Rebel. Get to know you, understand what you need to do to turn up your metabolic rate and also understand what will effect it and slow it down. Take back control – change your mind, change your body and change your life. Emma James MABNLP, MATLTA, MABH, Dip FTST IHHTT Author of Rebel Dietnwww.rebeldiet.com www.emmajames.net nn