Diet Warnings

Some important facts you should know about losing weight:

Be aware of gimmicks. I'm sure you've seen ads that say something like, "Lose 10 pounds in 5 days without dieting and without exercise!" Well, mathematically this is impossible, unless you will be losing a lot of muscle, fiber, and water, and probably very little fat. Look, 10 pounds is 35,000 calories. If you only use about 2,000 calories per day you would need at least 17.5 days to lose 10 pounds. This is assuming that you don't eat or drink anything at all during those days, which is of course impossible. These ads play on our emotions and our weaknesses. They know many people are desperate and will try almost anything and pay good money to try it. As for their guarantees, most people are too embarrassed to ask for their money back because they failed. So the company makes a lot of money and don't deliver what they promised.

Watch out for drugs. Most of these don't work. The ones that do can be addictive, can have serious side affects, people have even died from them. Some drugs may cause tolerance which means you need more and more of them to have the same affect. Most of them work by artificially increasing your metabolism by increasing your body heat. But, once you stop your metabolism will go below what it was before and you will probably gain all the weight back. If you are thinking of taking any drugs at least talk to your doctor first.

There is no such thing as a food which will burn all the fat off your body. You may have heard something like, eating celery sticks will burn more calories than you get from it. Who knows if this is true. But even if it is how many calories will this be? Probably very very few. And, how many celery sticks can you eat? Point is the body is much more clever than that.

Some studies have shown that with age losing fat becomes harder. It seems that as we get older our bodies like to hold on to the fat we have. Our metabolisms are slower, and we are less active.

With each diet losing fat becomes harder. Because the body remembers what you put it through in your last diet it is now more efficient at holding on to what it has and fights you all the way in losing weight.

After dieting you may find that you've gained more weight than what you were at before the diet. This happens because during severe dieting the body's metabolism slows down, meaning you now burn less calories than before. When you stop dieting you go back to eating regularly but your metabolism does not increase as easily. So, now you need less calories but you are eating the same. And the result is weight gain.

Set point theory is the belief that your body likes to maintain the weight it is at. And the longer you've been at a certain weight the harder it will fight you to stay there.

Genetics is the belief that some people are more predisposed to gaining fat. This is inconclusive and there is plenty of controversy if it's true or not. The argument is whether nature is stronger than nurture (lifestyle). For example, if a child with obesity predisposition is raised in a family with good eating and exercise habits, will they end up obese?