Healthy Weight Loss

We North Americans have many struggles with the idea of a healthy lifestyle and healthy weight loss. Many have tried all kinds of diets, we have cut out food groups, counted calories, kept food diaries, and generally tried to eat less than what we crave. Diets often do allow us to lose weight, and we feel empowered, only to gain it all back and then some, after we finish our diet.   

What in fact we need is to not go on a diet, but rather change the type of food we are eating, and move to healthy alternatives. The truth is we cannot just eat whatever we please without the consequence of gaining weight and subjecting ourselves to the consequent health issues. 

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Healthy weight loss must also incorporate an effective exercise program, and many diet programs neglect to even mention this. Diets are often bland, boring, lacking in flavor, and downright uninteresting. We can’t wait for them to finish, and then when they do we regain the weight. 

Repeat dieting, and following the latest fad, often just makes it more difficult to lose weight. Our bodies don’t know what is happening and can get all out of synch.

What we really need is a healthy lifestyle with lots of fresh and unprocessed food in modest quantities, that can also satisfy out cravings, and one that we can stick to for the rest of our lives.  

In order to be successful with healthy weight loss we need to follow a plan that is simple, logical, and easy to implement. It needs to satisfy us so that we can keep to it, and it needs to be healthy so that we can lose fat, and feel better about ourselves. 

Healthy weight loss should also be gradual and incremental so that when we look in the mirror we can see sustainable progress, that will strengthen our desire to continue, rather than the diet and binge cycle that is often evident. 

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Diets basically fail most people and more than once, they do not produce long-term benefits, and often make us feel worse about ourselves rather than better. This can be an emotional rollercoaster which doesn’t help us to stick with the diet. 

Diets fail because when we reduce our calorie intake our body goes into survival mode which is genetically programmed in to us. Our body slows metabolism and tries to store even more fat, and will also tend to use muscle for fuel in preference. When we go off our diet we have probably lost muscle, our metabolism is still slow and we gain back even more fat than we had before, even on our old calorie intake. 

Healthy weight loss does not use the traditional dieting idea of just restricting calorie intake, and absolute weight loss is not the only goal. A person could potentially become increasingly healthy without losing any weight at all as the body composition changes and muscle mass is increased. 

The focus needs to move away from diets to a good exercise program combined with a top quality diet which is low in fat, has good sources of protein to support muscle growth, and fresh carbohydrate sources to give energy to the working muscle.