It is quite something; the extremes many will go to to achieve weight loss and work towards the body of their dreams. How many people do you know that have, all of a sudden, looked a whole lot thinner than they usually do, only to then go and gradually regress and, often, put on more weight than they’d lost? A colleague, an aunt, your husband. We all know someone who has done a diet, gushed about the results and then abandoned the diet completely. But why does this happen, why doesn’t the weight stay off? What is it about fad diets that make them destined to fail? And how does allergy testing help?
Extreme dieting: Unsustainable
When dieting, there is one indisputable fact that is the basis for all diets;
You lose weight by eating in a caloric deficit.
But what does this mean? Put simply; this means that you must eat less calories than your body requires to perform all of its processes and the activities you do. This isn’t something that changes person to person when you gain weight; it is because you are consuming more calories than your body requires. So the caloric deficit is a non-negotiable when you’re looking to lose weight.
Healthy diets will have you eat at a 100-200 calorie deficit per day. This ensures that you will lose weight at a sustained rate. This is where fad diets fall down. Some fad diets will put you in incredibly extreme calorie deficit. As much as a 1000 calorie deficit. This creates an incredibly unhealthy attitude toward eating. You deprive yourself of food, and your body begins to crave food. When your calorie deficit is this high, you will also be likely depriving yourself of foods that you enjoy eating.
The unfortunate nature of the human brain is that, the more you deny yourself something you like, the more you crave it. So, eventually, the craving becomes too much, and you crash — big time. You will eat the food you’ve been craving and “THIS TASTES SO GOOD I MUST EAT MORE”. Before you know it, you’ve eaten yourself into a massive calorie deficit, and now your diet is falling apart. Once you start to lose control, you will usually totally lose control, and the diet is DONE.
Metabolic Damage
The thing with the extreme calorie deficit is that your body will adjust to this new caloric intake. To keep you alive, your body will start to adjust the efficiency of bodily processes. It does this to reduce the number of calories you need to survive. This is called metabolic damage and, once you return calories to their pre-diet level (and maybe beyond) you’re now eating in a more severe caloric excess because your body no longer needs the same level of calories. So more of the food you eat is converted to body fat.
Symptoms of Food Intolerance & Allergy Testing
Many fad diets don’t take bio-individuality into account, so they require you to eat foods that don’t agree with your body. Intolerance and allergy testing may identify foods that your body struggles to process. An incredibly common symptom of food intolerance is bloating. So when you’re eating foods that your body can’t digest efficiently, you’re exposing yourself to potential bloating. Intolerance and allergy testing can help you identify the foods that could be covering up your diet progress. You can find a range of intolerance and allergy testing to suit all budgets here.
