Are you thinking about losing weight? Do you know the reasons why restrictive diets don’t work? At first, they may even seem like the most effective solution in the fight against weight, but the truth is that they are not at all healthy.
Restrictive diets can have extreme results. However, not always in the way we imagine. By the way, in most cases, they even help you lose weight quickly, but the consequences can be very serious.
In addition to the chances of being able to get fat again in the future are enormous, you may be depriving your body of essential nutrients for the most basic functions.
In the fight against weight, it is extremely important to realize that deprivation often leads to high levels of stress and even compulsiveness. So it’s time to forget about restrictive diets and make peace with food in a healthy way.
BUT AFTER ALL, WHY RESTRICTIVE DIETS DON’T WORK?
Before explaining why restrictive diets don’t work, it’s crucial to know how to distinguish a diet of this kind from other less complex diets.
A restrictive diet encourages the person to stop eating or consuming some macronutrients. That is, food components that are essential for our body, such as fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.
Ever heard of the low-carb diet? This is just one of the examples of restrictive diets, whose objective is to drastically reduce the consumption of carbohydrates (or permanently eliminate them in your day-to-day life).
Now, as you would expect, this type of diet with deficits in a certain macronutrient can bring excessively fast and drastic results. However, it poses a danger to our health.
The risk of gaining weight again within 5 years is enormous.
The goal of going on a restrictive diet can be to lose weight or gain weight, for example. As a rule, this type of diet is more common for people who want to lose weight.
Approximately 75% of people who adopt them return to their previous weight. This is because this type of diet does not promote dietary re-education, as well as the adoption of other healthy habits that are crucial for maintaining an adequate weight for a long time.
There are several factors to consider when it comes to a diet: social context, family history, genetic factors, metabolism, behaviors, and many more.
Cause feelings of guilt
Restrictive diets often don’t work because they make us feel guilty about consuming certain foods. Something that, after a few months, can make us feel sad, discouraged, or angry and we quickly return to the food we used to eat before.
When we classify foods as “bad”, “good” or “bad”, we automatically promote a judgment of our food. However, it is crucial to remember that your eating habits do not reflect your worth as an individual.
Therefore, you should not feel guilty about what you eat or stop eating. The important thing is to feel good.
May trigger the onset of the disease
To go on a diet, it is not necessary to take radical measures. After all, these are almost always synonymous with bad results.
Often what happens when someone starts a restrictive diet is, over time, some related illness arises and they quickly stop their highly restricted food plan.
For example: carbohydrate-restricted and very low-protein diets can overload the kidneys and completely disrupt metabolism. In addition, they can cause a lack of insulin in the body and, consecutively, problems such as vomiting, hyperglycemia, or difficulty breathing.
And as you’d expect, anyone who starts having health problems from a diet of any kind will stop right away.
They make you hungry all-day
Going from 8 to 80 is never ideal. That is if this week you have one type of diet and the following week you adopt a restrictive diet, the probability of spending your days full of hunger is enormous. Consequently, it will make you quickly give up on the plan in a short time.
The first reason is related to the fact that these diets do not allow us to eat enough – ending up hindering the correct functioning of the organism and interfering with our well-being.
The other reason has to do with calorie restriction. By doing so, your levels of ghrelin (a hormone related to the urge to eat) in your stomach will increase.
This means that when we enter this state it is extremely difficult for us to be able to contain this enormous desire to eat everything in front of us.
Therefore, instead of opting for a restrictive diet, respect your body and make peace with food. Worry about your health and not the standards that society instills in us daily.
When in doubt, always consult your doctor and nutritionist, and together develop a properly adjusted food plan.