Mind the diet without starving the mind

The main drawback with someone on a diet is the mind; the mind can stand in the way of progress. At the front of a dieters’ mental consciousness is their relationship with calories and the bathroom scales. This can become a vicious circle and a recipe for failure.

Dieters imprison themselves at all levels so they can reach a constant flow of progress on the scales. This is tunnel vision dieting without any conce
for anything but numbers. Clever marketing has tricked and got inside the heads of the venerable dieters to the extreme where nutritional health isn’t the priority anymore.

For years the dieting industry has used the low calorie approach to answer the obesity problem leaving the public with a very shallow understanding about nutrition. This has left a very sour taste in the mouth of many dieters whose progress has vanished in thin air instead of seeing excess body weight and fat disappear.

So what can potentially go wrong for a typical dieter? If the desired bodyweight is reached it is likely to be only temporary due to the unnatural dieting methods followed. This normally leads to a lifetime of yoyo dieting with body weight fluctuations and malnutrition.

The run of the mill low calorie dieting advice has led people to do things on gut feeling rather than on actual proven formulas. For example, if someone is not losing at a rate they desire they will either cut their calories to a dangerously low level and/or increase their exercise volume to compensate for a lack of progress. It becomes a battle that can’t be won resulting in more vulnerability towards worthless quick fixes.

If something sounds too good to be true then it normally is. It is essential to approach dieting with an open mind and great care must be taken when choosing whose advice to follow. Once a basic understanding about nutrition is achieved it is easy to pick out the proper advice from the ridiculous scams. The shelves of supermarkets and health food shops are full of diet foods connected to the biggest companies in the diet industry. No matter what it reads on the label if it contains ingredients you can’t pronounce or high amounts of sugar or sodium then it cant’ be helping you fight the fat can it? Remember knowing the basics can save you years of frustration and loads of money in the process.

I will finish this article by saying using the mirror or using a tape measure is far more better then getting weighed and living by numbers. What you see is what you get.