Five Reasons Why Restrictive Diets Do More Harm Than Good
This was a Guest Post by Lara Zibarras on Pick the Brain
If you’re anything like the vast majority of the population, you started this year with one of these goals as a top priority: “get in shape”, “lose weight”, “get fit” or “get healthy”.
I get it. For the longest time my Januarys started with a rigid healthy eating plan to get back in shape and lose the holiday bulge.
Having tried almost every diet imaginable, it’s clear that most diets we follow do one of two things, they either restrict calories or restrict food groups. Even so-called it’s not a diet but a lifestyles are still a diet because you cut the amount of food, or food groups (despite the marketing suggesting they aren’t diets).
Diets “work” in the short term because in one way or another you are reducing the amount you eat. Whether that’s through counting calories or macros, limiting the time period in which you can eat, cutting out carbs or sugar, or “elimination” diets. When you are eating less, the idea is that you will lose weight.
And for the most part we do, at least to begin with… Research shows that during the first six months of any diet (be it calorie counting or cutting carbs), the vast majority of people lose around 5-10% of their body weight.
So far so good… but there’s a dark side that people just don’t talk about. In the long-run, restrictive diets actually do you more harm than good and here’s five reasons why…