What is a Healthy Weight Loss?
All over the world there are people, businesses & governments discussing what a healthy weight loss is and how to achieve a healthy weight loss. Now this is where the problem lies! There are so many people out there trying to do good, trying to make changes to government policies, trying to get the information out to everyone to help with the obesity issues we have not just in Ireland but around the world but there are probably even more people who are more focused on taking your money and taking advantage of you when you are feeling so low that they get you hooked into fad diets promising you quick weight loss, fast weight loss and promising them that they will lose so many stone in the first week or two. The old saying of “if it sounds too good then it is too good” rings true.
I’ve discussed before in my blog posts that weight loss is not easy and does not happen over night so when I see signs and slogans saying ‘Get Super Skinny today’ or ‘Be Skinny in a Week’, they really annoy me and I feel sorry for people who get hooked and believe that what they pay into will work – I should know, I used to be one of those people. I must have tried every diet under the sun and wasted SO MUCH money on made up diets, fad diets, what ever you want to call them. In the long run and for the majority of people THEY DO NOT WORK.
There is something seductive about fad diets, isn’t there? They promise that losing weight is as easy as following a formula: ‘no carbs after breakfast’; ‘only bananas before lunch’; ‘eat two eggs every day’. That’s all you have to do! And when you hear about one of them it’s only natural to think “wow, that doesn’t sound too difficult.” Even if you’ve tried a fad diet before without success, it’s tempting to think that the next one that you hear about could be different.
Why fad diets don’t work
There is a lot of variety in exactly what fad diets instruct you to do in order to lose weight. One thing that they always have in common, however, is that they always have a ‘gimmick’.
Take the recently popular ‘banana diet’. This is the fad diet that instructs people to eat only bananas and drink room temperature water for breakfast regardless of what is consumed for the rest of the day. – this is its gimmick. Eating fruit for breakfast is not a terrible idea, but for many people it’s not a substantial enough morning meal. Also, there are very few people who wouldn’t get completely sick of bananas after a week or two of eating them every day! Whenever you have a diet that says eat all you want, there’s the possibility that people who are prone to overeating will have problems, and you learn absolutely nothing about your body – Would you be able to keep this up for the rest of you life?
Other fad diets don’t work because their gimmick means that they amount to crash dieting; that is, drastically restricting your calorie intake. Doing this can greatly slow your metabolism and will work for the first week as your initial weight loss is just water loss and can also cause you to lose muscle rather than fat. And overall, the reason fad diets don’t work is that they are more wrapped up in having an attention-grabbing gimmick than in giving you a structure and advice that take all of the factors involved into account and could actually work. Losing weight and/or transforming your body are not complicated things to do, but neither are they easy. Fad diets make these things out to be easy, but the vast majority of the time they don’t achieve long-term results.
If they don’t work, why do they exist?
The reason that we’re ready to believe in the latest fad diet is that we want things to be easy, from getting a good job, to finding love and losing weight. To avoid doing something hard we’re ready to lie to ourselves that all we need to do is follow a simple formula in order to lose weight. It’s much better to face the reality that losing weight is hard, and adopt a gimmick-free strategy of doing it anyway.
If you want to lose weight, don’t go down the route of a “fad diet” – take the time and put in the effort to do it properly.
So What Is A Healthy Weight Loss?
A healthy weight loss is a weight loss that is both manageable and sustainable and incorporates and promotes a healthy lifestyle with regards food as well as adding exercise into your lifestyle. Medical boards and governments around the world all recommend that you lose a maximum of 2lbs per week for it to be a healthy and sustainable weight loss solution. Trying to lose more than 2lbs per week would become unsustainable for most and with the calorie reductions needed, any more than 2lbs per week would be unhealthy.
To achieving a healthy weight loss and a successful weight loss, incorporate healthy eating and exercise into your daily routine. Remember you need to reduce your calorie intake by 3500 calories to lose 1lb. The best way and again the recommended way to do this are by using a food diary. Using the food diary from Why Weight Ireland calculates your personal calorie needs depending on your height, age, sex and activity level so you get an accurate calorie allowance. Following this allowance, depending on what weight loss amount you chose either 0.5lb, 1lb, 1.5lb or 2lbs per week, your food diary will show you exactly how to hit your weight loss target. The food and exercise diary will also show you the foods you eat that are causing your calories and fat allowance to increase so you can educate yourself about food. This is the long run helps for greater success of maintaining your weight when you hit your goal.