Have you been a serial dieter for years, have you ever imagined how blissful it would be to be able to give up diets forever, wouldn’t it? It’s amazing the number of people who spend a very large proportion of their lives going on a diet. Some of them may go on their own diets, but others regularly put their hands into their pockets and shell out money for the latest package of weight loss promises.
If somebody said to you that endless dieting was very bad for you, what would you say? Unfortunately, serial dieting does you absolutely no good, both physically and mentally.
The physical dimension is that dieting can have a profound effect on your weight. It can actually make your weight problem worse. When you lose weight you lose fat, but you also lose muscle. When you put the weight back on again, what comes back is fat, not muscle.
Unless you go on a fairly intensive course of resistance exercises, you will never recover that muscle mass. Added to that, as you get older you lose muscle mass naturally. You lose between 0.5% and 2% of muscle mass every year over the age of forty. If you lose muscle mass through going on endless diets and natural muscle loss can have a pretty devastating effect on you physically. It leaves you very weak, and as you get older mobility gets to be an even greater problem – particularly if you are still overweight.
Mentally, serial dieters can have very real problems. Mostly this is brought about not only by the debilitating effect of constant dieting, but dealing with constant failure.
The best way to lose weight is not to go on a diet. This way you will be able to resign your membership of the serial dieters club. What to do? The best and only to lose weight permanently, is to make change. You have to recognize and get rid of the habits that make you fat and learn new habits, slim habits. Learning new slim habits is the only sure way to achieve permanent weight loss and a physically and mentally healthy life.
