DIETS CAN MAKE YOU FAT!
Another major problem with restrictive diets is that they often aren’t nutritionally thought through and many times you literally starve your body. If you deliberately stop yourself eating when your body is genuinely screaming for food, you are fighting against the most powerful instinct in the world: survival. No wonder people find it hard. When you do this, your body’s metabolism slows down; yes down. If it keeps going at the rate it is with such a small amount of food coming in, you will die very quickly. This is why the minute the body senses that there is a severe lack of food coming in, it assumes you have no choice in this decision (after all no other creature on earth would restrict in times of abundance). And rather than let you die, your metabolism slows down considerably to conserve energy. At the same time, the body stores even more of what you do eat as fat as it senses lean times ahead. Because the fat is needed, the body even begins to burn muscle tissue, which is a bit of a bugger as muscle helps to burn excess fat – so a double whammy. In fact, virtually every time you go on a restrictive diet you lose muscle tissue and gain more fat cells. Once you gain fat cells they never die, they simply shrink. This is why it is so much easier for people who have been overweight in the past to gain weight again … rapidly.
MORE BIG FAT PROBLEMS
When the ‘diet’ is over (which normally happens either when you say ‘sod the diet’ or you somehow manage to reach your physical goal) your metabolism is still working much slower than before you started the diet. It will increase again, but gradually – which is why it is important to build food up again slowly and not overeat. However, as most people are chomping at the bit for the diet to end so they can ‘live normally’ again, any chances of a gradual increase in food is pretty slim. In fact, any ‘end of diet’ period is usually followed by a massive meal – either to celebrate the achievement, or to illustrate the fact that ‘life is too short so sod you all …’ etc.
Having acquired a slower metabolism, you now go back to eating exactly the same amount of food you ate before you started the diet. What happens? You put on more weight than before you started the diet – and, it seems, a lot faster than it took to shift it. This is not simply your perception either. A study carried out on a group of rats in 1986 showed that by the time they did their second diet, the weight loss was half of what it was the first time and, wait for it, the weight was put back on THREE TIMES AS FAST. This is happening to millions of people around the world as we speak. The problem is it’s a cause and effect chain reaction, for when you see the weight rapidly piling on again you once again think that it’s time to do something about it – what? Yep the latest DIET.
Now I understand why dieting, as well as the addiction to certain foods and drinks, makes people fat. They often contribute to the problem people are trying to solve. It is only in fairly recent times that people have reached over 500 lb (227 kg) in weight. One family in the US – The Woods family – weighed in at 1 tonne – yes ONE TONNE. And if you think we are talking about a large family (so to speak), we are talking a combined weight of just four women. One girl, Terriny Woods, was 41 stone 12lb(over 260 kg) and she was just 15 years old at the time. Yes 15 years old.
If you keep going on a diet and then binge directly afterwards, your body will produce more fat cells, your metabolism will not know what the hell it’s doing and your system will store more fat in case you starve it again. This is the cycle people repeat again and again. Physically and mentally diets can be a nightmare. You never break free from the constant mental battle of trying to control your intake of certain foods or certain amounts of food. Nor do you break free from the many physical problems they create – all that happens is you become totally obsessed with food. You’re not happy when you feel you can’t eat and you feel like crap after you do it. It’s time to stop this madness. It’s time to fix the leaking roof once and for all and stop replacing the tiles.
The Medical ‘Solution’
There are of course many people who have been through the dieting mill and have realized this is not a long-term solution. At the same time their excess weight, as well as ailments related to their obesity, often cause people to take much more drastic measures than simply trying the latest diet. The increase in weight loss surgery and weight loss pills has exploded over recent years. Big people are big business and there are many people making billions of pounds by preying on their insecurities and desperation – all in the name of ‘medical help’ and ‘genuine care’ you understand. While I am all for some short-term medical intervention in many areas of ‘disease’, I see no place whatsoever for weight loss pills. And when I say no place, I mean no place at all. Even weight loss surgery, in some very desperate cases, can at times be the only solution to save a life and I can see at least a debate for it. However, these all new all-dancing and singing ‘weight loss solution’ pills are never the answer. Weight loss drugs are no longer aimed simply at the morbidly obese and given by GPs only as a last resort to those who really do feel they have tried everything else and would possibly die otherwise. Unfortunately things have got so far out of hand with the weight loss drug industry (as indeed I believe it has with the whole drug industry no matter what the disease) that I think it’s now safe to say we are without any question on the verge of …
In 1998, the NHS (National Health Service) gave out 20,000 anti-obesity pills. Just seven years later in 2005 that figure rose to 880,000 pills, the figure will almost certainly be over 1 million pills today. This annual cost to the NHS was £690,000 in the late 1990s and is now nearly £40 million. Yes FORTY MILLION POUNDS of your tax money going directly into the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, and the figure is growing daily. The government justify the ever increasing costs by claiming, ‘… the benefits to the economy outweigh the cost to the NHS’, they go on to explain, ‘… a lot of illness can be avoided by using these pills to aid weight loss’. Exactly what illnesses have ever been ‘cured’ as a direct result of the introduction of so many weight loss drugs I don’t exactly know, but no doubt there will be some ‘scientific data’ to back up such claims and if there aren’t it wouldn’t be too difficult to get some. I also haven’t seen a reduction of people gaining weight either, which given all you have to do is take a pill, is surprising. If these weight loss drugs are, as they often purport to be, ‘the easy solution to fat and obesity’, and given we are in an obesity epidemic, why don’t they simply give them to everyone so we can all live a ‘fat free’ and disease free life?
Well the simple answer is they aren’t exactly the ‘magic