The Truth About Dieting
Think about how much of your time gets ‘eaten up’ by obsessing about the shape and size of your body and what you can or cannot eat. Now think of what you would prefer to be doing with that time … and go and do it!
Recommended Reading:
Real Gorgeous: The Truth About Body and Beauty by Kaz Cooke
- There are millions of gorgeous body shapes. Yours is one of them. Dieting doesn’t work. Your thighs are pretty cute. Exercise should be fun not duty. Cheap cosmetics can be as good as expensive ones. Advertising lies. Plastic surgery sucks. Modelling can be miserable. You can recover from an eating disorder. You can read magazines and watch television critically. You can fight the Body Police.
Any attempts in the name of weight loss, healthy eating or body sculpting to DENY your body of the essential, well-balanced
nutrients and calories it needs to function to its fullest capacity.
The Facts
Dieting hardly ever works and it can be dangerous:
Figures show that around 95% of people who diet will regain the weight they lost … and more within 1-5 years. It actually forces your body into what is known as starvation mode, That is a lot of normal functions slow down because your body has to strive to conserve energy. This means that daily life and just doing ordinary things becomes much more of an effort - studies show that people on diets are slower to react and aren’t able to concentrate as well as those not dieting.
- Figures show that around 95% of people who diet will regain the weight they lost … AND MORE within 1-5 years.
- It actually forces your body into what is known as starvation mode i.e. a lot of normal functions slow down because your body has to strive to conserve energy. This means that daily life and just doing ordinary things becomes much more of an effort - studies show that people on diets are slower to react and aren’t able to concentrate as well as those not dieting
- Dieters often experience things like
- Loss of muscular strength and endurance
- Thinning hair
- Loss of co-ordination
- Dehydration
- Weakness and slowed heart rates, dizziness and even fainting spells
- Numerous studies link obsessive dieting with feelings of depression, low-self esteem and increased stress
- Dieters often miss out on a whole heap of important and ESSENTIAL nutrients like calcium which can lead to osteoporosis and broken bones
- Yo-Yo dieting - does this sound familiar? Where you try a different diet out every couple of weeks because the previous one didn’t work? This type of dieting can increase the risk of heart disease and have long-lasting negative effects on metabolism
Dieting has become a national pastime - especially for women
"A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings" - Hippocrates
- More than $40 BILLION per year is spent on dieting and diet products in America - this is approximately the same amount that the USA Government spends on education each year
- It is estimated that around 50% of American women are attempting to lose weight at any point in time
- A survey was conducted on a university campus and it showed that 91% of women had dieted with 22% saying they dieted a lot or always
- Researches have shown that children as young as 9-11 year old are worried about their body image and already dieting
(sourced from the National Eating Disorders Assoc)