Diets don’t work.
This is a frustrating topic for me and I understand that people are confused about the information out there and they don’t know what to do….
So I would like to lead you on a “common sense” path to help you learn why diets don’t work.
I care about this topic because too many people are damaging not only their health but self esteem. With mental health being a huge concern these days this is very damaging (but that’s a whole other story).
People ask me about all the wrong things – their focus seems to be on the “quick fix” the instant era, were the results need to be in quickly and painlessly. Well I’m here to tell you that as it may not be quick, but it certainly can be painless.
This is where education comes into it – reading, researching and guidance. I will list my top five books for you to read so as you too can be educated on making the right decision about your health in the near future, the painless way!
We live in a society of FOMO’s (Fear Of Missing Out), and the latest fads – and to be truthful, these are no good to any of you.
Think of it this way – If you were planning on building your dream home – you would sit with a draftsman, plan out your layout of the internal and external design that suits you and your family, select the best materials that suited YOUR home, you would have a progress plan (well the best you can when it comes to builders and tradesmen) and you would spend the money it deserves to get the outcome you want, and finally to have the furnishings you have always desired.
Let’s put this into YOU – your own body – your FIRST home, because you live in your body every single day.
Your draftsman (coach) would sit with you and structure a program (layout) of how your life is currently (you and your family) and then work out what you need to structure for you and your family to be able to achieve your goals – realistically. Then comes the design for your progress (materials) you need to take it step by step (like applying the the right trades to come in the right order), you need the right steps to work through. Once this is done you shop for your new clothes (furnishings).
Let’s think about it; you don’t expect your house to be built in a few weeks, so why do you expect this of your body. You design the house to live in for the next 20 years to come, and this is the way you should be thinking of your body, you don’t want to put in extreme amount of work, to only have it last a couple of months, you want your work to last a long time, maybe for the rest of your life.
To be truthful, these quick fix diets take a lot of your money, and leaves your health in a worse condition. Many of the diet programs contain polyunsaturated oils that harm your cells in your body, which inflict cells to be damaged, leading to chronic illnesses. Some of the diet plans still focus on low fat products, which contain higher sugar content. Some diet plans try to tempt you with all the “treats” so you don’t feel like you are on a diet, yet again they have refined carbohydrates that break down into sugar.
The artificial sweeteners are another trap, causing your sweet taste buds to increase to a higher sweetness level, therefore sugar cravings become out of control, plus artificial sweeteners are just that “artificial” which are a foreign object in your body – again harming your cells, causing inflammation and chronic illnesses.
The popular answer to time poor and quick fix junkies are the prepackaged “fresh” foods. The concern with this is that they are packaged in plastic (toxins) that your body can and will reject, they usually contain many preservatives and additives (shelf life aspect).
Yes they may save you time and dishes, but they will have a taxing effect on your hormones, which is a big concern to your ever continuing roller coaster of weight gain and loss.
When it comes to “diets”, I suggest you research more widely, and looking for a place to start is these 5 books, they give you history of where these myths come from, what the truth is, and hopefully you can understand how our bodies function with real food and common sense.
It’s not that you have failed – it’s the system that has failed you many times. I hope you read at least one of these books, and get a better understanding of how your body works, and that you feel you are getting onto the right track.
1. The Calorie Myth – Jonathan Bailor
https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Calorie-Myth/9780062267337
This book explains why you fluctuate in weight, why you not only gain the weight back you’ve lost, but you gain back a couple of more kilos. Eating more and exercising less helps you to lose weight and live better.
Jonathan explains how to eliminate toxic foods that zap your energy and add inches to your waistline.
The human body does not recognize all calories as equal, some foods are used to boost brain power, fuel metabolism and heal the body. So the calorie in – calorie out scenario is long gone…
“Eating less of a traditional western diet does not cause long-term fat loss because this approach incorrectly assumes that taking in fewer calories forces our body to burn fat. That has been clinically proven to be false. Eating less does not force us to burn body fat. It forces us to burn fewer calories. That is why dieters walk around tired and crabby all day. Their bodies and brains have slowed down.”
“The research is clear: if we want to burn fat and boost our health for the next sixty years as opposed to the next sixty days, let’s not starve ourselves”.
2. Sugar Crush – Dr Richard Jacoby
https://www.bookdepository.com/Sugar-Crush/9780062348227
This book is in your face about sugar and the damages it can do to you. As a leading peripheral nerve surgeon Dr Jacoby deals first hand with amputations to patience, but instead of just booking patient after patient in for removal of their limbs – he wanted to get to the root cause of why this was becoming a serious problem with more and more people becoming diabetic.
“We have much evidence that carbohydrates (including all sugars, as well as “starches” and alcohol that convert to sugar) cause inflammation.”
This is what scares me with all the “diet programs” including these foods in your programs.
“Sugar stimulates your brain to release the body’s natural “feel-good chemicals” : dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, which in turn make you want to eat more sugar so that you produce more of the chemicals. When you eat sugary foods, you’re consuming a white powder that’s every bit as addictive as cocaine.”
So the artificial sweeteners – your body registers them as a sugar – it’s still an insulin response, so this is still stirring those chemicals – making you want more and more, but the sweeteners are not nutrient dense, making you still feel empty, but addicted!
3. Fat for Fuel – Dr Joseph Mercola
https://www.bookdepository.com/Fat-for-Fuel/9781401950774
Dr Mercola is a passionate advocate of natural medicine, he has been a physician for over 30 years.
This man knows his stuff and has a substantial following worldwide.
This book again reveals the lies told in the 1960’s from Ancel Keys a scientist falsifying his studies to make us believe that saturated fat was bad for us and that we were to change our diets to vegetable oils and margarine. Like anything that has been around for decades, enough research can be done to prove otherwise and expose Ancel Keys.
Fat for Fuel explains how the marketing of “Health and Fitness” has been portrayed and that we really need to read widely to understand that there is more to health than nutrition and exercise.
Reducing calories and following ridiculous diets schemes again harms our body and our mitochondria (our body’s own power house).
“Despite it simplicity and proven merit, calorie restriction remains a strategy few people are willing to embrace. The good news is that eating a high-fat, adequate-protein, and low carb diet allows you to reap the benefits of calorie restriction without deprivation or difficulty”
“If you’ve followed Australia’s dietary nutritional plans (or lite and easy) and started loading up on bread, fat-free cereals, and skim milk while also hitting the gym a few times a week, and your excess weight has not only budged but has increased, well, whose fault is that? According to all the conventional sources of nutritional guidance, the fault is yours.
The assumption is that you must not have been trying hard enough, or you weren’t doing it right. Of course this is demoralizing.”
You need to spend time reading this brilliant books to help you understand the history of where it all went wrong and how your body will reward you from nourishing your body correctly, not starving it from its rightful nutrients.
4. Primal Fat Burner – Nora Gedgauda
https://www.bookdepository.com/Primal-Fat-Burner/9781760291990
In this book Nora helps explain to the reader how a ketogenic diet makes you consume fewer calories overall without depriving your body of the nutrients it needs to help you feel better, look better, think clearer and live longer.
Eating fewer calories without counting calories is very different to the typical “calorie counting diet”. This style of eating is practical, it’s about feeding your body correctly, which inadvertently results in eating fewer calories without all the wasted energy on calorie counting per say.
The book goes into depth about how our body operates on fat, our metabolic fuel, the concerns of sugar and the importance of vitamins within our diet.
“I have distilled my research into a number of concise and relatively easy-to-grasp categories in order to cut through the confusion and mark a clear path forward that anyone can understand and follow”
“One reason that so many people begin to feel and function better when they become primal fat burners is that a mainstream diet has left their body depleted and desperate to replenish its stores of critical nutrients. By optimizing the diet with nutrient dense high-quality foods, the cells, tissues, and organs finally receive the amount of fat-soluble nutrients they need to function best – sometimes for the first time in years (or ever)”
Nora explains the ways you can be deficient due to low-fat diets, stress, vegetarianism plus how sugar, sodas grains and non-organic produce can deplete nutritional stores. This can be a huge issue if you continue to follow “quick fix” programs, as they never cover the vitamin and mineral aspects.
This is an expose all about heart disease and other chronic illnesses, and if you, like Nora and myself have lost loved ones due to the flawed “dietary heart hypothesis” – high intake of fat and cholesterol causes heart disease, you too will be angry at how so many people have been misled, and have had their health and lives jeopardize because of this.
5. The secret life of fat – Sylvia Tara
https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Secret-Life-of-Fat/9781911274001
Sylvia wrote this book after noticing that she ate far less and exercised more than her friends, and yet couldn’t lose as much weight, she began her research into the science of fat.
This book helps you to understand fat, how it influences our appetite and willpower, how it defends itself when attacked and why it grows back so quickly. You will find out how our genetics and hormones determine how much fat we have and where exactly it will show.
“When cells respond poorly to insulin, our pancreas just produces more insulin – it “turns up the volume” in the hope that our cells will finally get the message. This leads to an escalating spiral of more insulin output by the pancreas, followed by more insulin resistance by cells.
Eventually, our cells stop responding to insulin entirely. This is a very bad outcome, because if our cells don’t take sugars and fat from our blood, the sugars and fats will circulate endlessly, and start piling up in places where they don’t belong, such as in the arteries, the liver, and elsewhere. This leads to type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, and eventuates into more damaging health concerns. Additionally, since cells can’t internalize sugar and fats from our blood, they are starved of nutrients. This makes us hungrier, which in turn induces more eating, creating more fat, promoting a vicious cycle.”
A study completed by Leibel and Rosenbaum found
“That leptin levels decreased significantly after weight loss. This was not surprising, considering that fat secretes leptin, and these subjects now had less fat. But in addition to lower leptin, thyroid hormones decreased significantly as well. Thyroid hormones regulate metabolism – when their level decreases, so does our metabolic rate.
Anyone who’s reduced weight by diet or any other means, tends to regain weight with very high accuracy. People will generally go back to the weight that they started at, not one that’s way below or way above, as if the body were somehow able to sense where its normal amount of body fat is.
The decreasing hormone levels provided a reason why metabolism slowed, and why we expend less energy after weight loss than before.”
This is why I believe diets don’t work.
People want the quick fix and don’t stop to consider that they have put their body into a bad state of health, their hormones have been thrown out of whack, their metabolism has slowed down, they will have lost lean muscle mass which is the key to your metabolism, so therefore of course makes burning calories slower, and maintaining weight loss harder.
Eating foods on a standard “one fits all” protocol does not work. Men to women, older adults to younger adults, night shift workers to office desk workers, mums to single women – we are ALL different, so therefore why are we all following the same eating and exercise plan?
Eating whole foods, with the right saturated fats, good quality protein will help you stay satiated and not get HANGRY, learning to get the sleep your body requires, having stress managing protocols is a must so your “diet” doesn’t have to be painful.
If you take the time to learn how your body operates, how everything is connected – your hormones, your metabolism, your correct fuel and amount of fuel you need (food – each person requires different amounts of food depending on their level of activity, their recovery process ), your stress levels, the amount of sleep you get, then you to will understand that diets don’t work.
If you don’t enjoy reading or haven’t got the time, then have a look if these books are in an audio format.
I wish you well in your health journey, and I thank you for reading this article.
If you want more books to read I’m have to refer more.
To your health and wellbeing
Kerrie
#healthycoach
