Diets Don’t Make You Healthy

Our motto: Don’t be a fool, eat for fuel.

Greetings fellow fatbloggers, health seekers and those seeking to trim down a bit of extra girth. Last week I spoke on how Diets Don’t Make You Beautiful, well to continue with the theme of what else diet’s don’t do, I’d like to discuss that dieting doesn’t make you healthy. In fact, it has the potential to actually make you unhealthy.

Most often unhealthy dieting is caused by wanting a quick fix. Several factors can contribute to being unhealthy when following a so-called “diet” to lose weight. For example:

Reducing calories too low can permanently damage metabolism.
Eliminating a food group can cause nutrition and vitamin deficiency.
Eating very little, for far too long even beyond reaching a healthy weight can lead to emotional problems as well as several phyiscal ones.
Taking diet pills can numerous side affects.

The one major lesson I’ve learned after losing 99 lbs so far, is a body that is not given nutritious food will not lose weight. It also matters what kind of foods you eat - even one meal of high fat meal affects your arteries, which is why you need healthy fats (one meal of these helps protect your arteries).

Also a person can be thin and trim - but have large, unseen fat deposits on the inside and be at risk for heart disease, etc:

“Being thin doesn’t automatically mean you’re not fat,” said Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London. According to the data, people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim. “The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined,” said Bell, whose research is funded by Britain’s Medical Research Council. (Source: Thin people might be fat on the inside)

So folks stop fretting over the scale so much. If you eat for fuel and move your butt, the scale will go down (just slowly). Pay more attention to overall health, get regular check ups, and most of all stay active.

What creates health, zest for living and an abundance of energy? Answer: Eating for fuel and daily fun (movement and exercise).

Note: I want to give a shout out to Crabby McSlacker also mentioned a related topic in her Random Friday post, with a link to a post titled Fit and Fat is Better Than Thin and Unfit about a study that shows it is more important to be active then trim, in summary “Fit older men and women who were obese had a lower risk of death over a 12 year period than unfit people of normal weight.”

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