Diet Traps Exposed

The Dieting Myths That May be Keeping You Fat

You only need to walk the streets of any large Western city to see an epidemic overload of advertisements for the latest and greatest answers to quick weight loss. The problem is, most of them don't work and some are just plain dangerous.

Dozens of new crash diets and crazy diet fads hit the market every year. Most result in causing your body to retaliate with a rebound weight gain that produces even larger fat deposits in the body. These diets are not only unhealthy but they can also end up damaging your metabolism and keeping you from losing weight.

A popular technique used by some advertisers to entice you to buy their diet, is to use bits and pieces of scientific fact to make their diet look more legitimate. The problem is that most people who follow these restrictive diets end up gaining more weight than they lost when they finish the diet.

Why Diets Don't Work?

Let's look at some of the more popular diets individually.

The low fat diet

What's wrong with the low fat diet?

The theory behind the low fat diet is that only fat can make you fat. The suggestion is that if you just eat less fat, your body will magically transform and the fat will fall off.

Unfortunately this theory is wrong.

The prime directive of the body is survival. This means that when less fat becomes available, the body responds by storing fat more efficiently. This causes an increase in fat accumulation. What this means is that your body gets fatter when placed on a low fat diet.

Another problem created by this type of diet is that it causes you to eat more. A study done at Cornell University identified the fact that total food intake increased. Volunteers ate as much as 45 percent more food when they thought the food they were eating was low in fat.

This style of low fat dieting tricks the dieter into believing that eating foods containing fat is the principal cause of weight gain is. As a result they cut back on fat but flood their body with highly refined carbohydrate foods. This raises their blood sugar and insulin levels, resulting in an even bigger urge to eat when they finally crash.

The Grazing Diet

What's wrong with eating small frequent meals?

Grazing is recommended by some so called experts as a good technique to lose weight. The theory here is that the dieter will burn more calories if they eat more often. The explanation given is that the body uses more calories to digest food, and the constant consumption of food keeps the furnace burning, while leveling out blood sugar levels to prevent hunger.

This diet is also more a fad than a reality. It is based on the premise that it works for many naturally thin people who eat small frequent meals and don't gain weight. The suggestion is that if the overweight copy this behaviour, they will also end up thin.

Unfortunately grazing does not work for people who gain weight easily. Grazing doesn't work for these people because they have a different metabolic profile from their thin counterparts.

Increasing the frequency of meals by grazing fails for the overweight. It does so for several reasons. The initially small and frequent meals don't stay small for long. They often increase in size, becoming larger and larger as the diet progresses. Suddenly the dieters find that they adjusted their eating patterns to a larger volume as well as greater meal frequency.

Research has shown that in the overweight population, increasing meal frequency actually increases insulin levels, and this creates greater hunger and easier weight gain.

The Low Glycemic Index Diet

What's wrong with counting carbohydrates?

The Low GI diet is another popular diet. This diet focuses on how the body responds to different quality carbohydrates. Used correctly this form of dieting can be useful. However, the use of the Glycemic Index is commonly misunderstood and can result in severely restricting the intake of some very healthy and essential carbohydrates.

There are many aspects of Glycemic Index that have a lot of merit for weight loss. Unfortunately the Glycemic Index can be easily manipulated and most people do not have any clear understanding of what the numbers really mean and how they impact on their diet.

It is important to understand that GI is only a number. It does not take into consideration the real, and slightly more complex, issue of Glycemic Load. There are some foods, like beetroot, that have a high GI and are avoided, when, in fact, they can be eaten freely because of their low Glycemic Load.

Another problem with focusing only on GI is the fact that GI can be manipulated in several ways. For example, the GI of a food can be decreased by adding fat to the carbohydrate in question. This creates a lower GI but a much less healthy and more fattening food. As a result, followers of this regime end up eating food that is not nearly as good or as healthy as they think it is when judged by the Glycemic Index only.

Crash Diets and Fad Diets

Why dieting makes you fat?

There are far too many gimmicky diets and fad diets that masquerade as healthy diets. These diets have the potential to strip your body of valuable vitamins and minerals and also to damage your metabolism.

Crash diets usually result in the creation of the 'yo-yo' pattern of weight gain followed by weight loss. This is the one of the reasons for the saying: "dieting can make you fat." Let me explain why.

When someone loses weight rapidly on a crash diet, they don't lose only fat. They lose fluid and they also lose lean muscle tissue at the same time. When they 'yo-yo' and regain the weight, they only regain the fat and fluid, but they don't regain the lost muscle. This means that after each weight-loss and weight-gain cycle the percentage of body fat increases. The dieter becomes fatter with each cycle.

When someone loses weight rapidly on a crash diet, they don't lose only fat. They lose fluid and they also lose lean muscle tissue at the same time. When they 'yo-yo' and regain the weight, they only regain the fat and fluid, but they don't regain the lost muscle. This means that after each weight-loss and weight-gain cycle the percentage of body fat increases. The dieter becomes fatter with each cycle.

For the moment, I would like to leave you with is the following message: "What you don't know about dieting can hurt you." It can keep you from losing weight. It can prevent you from getting healthy and avoiding disease.