Popular diet plans and wight loss programs tend to promise unrealistic results and often lead to alot of disappointment. and This whole business of losing weight can be a frustrating, constant struggle!!! Many diets are so unnatural and so unrealistic that it can never become a REAL lifestyle that you can live with…let alone enjoy!

Most programs don’t even deal with our cravings and our desires, or how to attend to our feelings of hunger and fullness. Eventually, we become “just plain tired” of the hunger, lack of flavor, lack of flexibility, the lack of energy and THE FEELING OF DEPRIVATION.

We quit our diets and then GAIN BACK THE WEIGHT WE’VE LOST …AND SOMETIMES WE GAIN EVEN MORE!!!

A tragic statistic – Only 3% of diets and weight loss programs on the market are successful! Why is that? What are the common denominators? What are the common flaws of these diets? And more importantly, what is the SOLUTION to this medical problem with epidemic proportions? First piece of advice: STOP listening to UNQUALIFIED mass-marketers and START taking the advice of health care professionals who are QUALIFIED and trained in health and wellness, and in particular weight loss! So, if you are a health care professional, get trained and certified: not only will you truly help your patients lose that weight forever and make them healthy again, BUT you will also enjoy an extra stream of income! For the best available training, contact ELITE – Aesthetic, Medical & Business Training at 1-877-847-9200 or visit their website at eliteambt.com! Obesity is the disease of diseases, and YOU as a physician or other health care professional NEED to take responsible, now!

What are the common flaws of these ‘FAD’ diets and popular weight loss program? Well, there are many! For one, they are all “One-Size-Fits-All” approaches. That means that these diets are NOT individualized or customized. If 1000 people sign up for Nutrisystem (or any other diet for that matter) today, all 1000 people will be put on the exact same diet with the exact same guidelines. Does that make sense? Of course not! Should someone who is 150 pounds be put on the same diet as someone who is 270 pounds? I don’t think so! What about people’s medical history and specific dietary needs? What about their individual goals, body composition, eating behaviors, physical activity level etc.? Also, there’s NO physician supervision and therefore these diets can be potentially dangerous!

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Next, most of these popular diets and weight loss programs are low calorie diets (LCD), and that’s usually the ONLY reason why people lose weight on these diets. What is a LCD and what are calories, you may ask? Well, calories are basically energy. And all of us need a certain amount of energy or calories to sustain life on a daily basis (also referred to as BMR or Basic Metabolic Rate). People who are mostly sedentary and inactive may only require 1200 to 1500 calories per day, while Michael Phleps (so I’ve heard) burns over 5000 calories per day. Now, these LCD’s restrict your caloric intake. You are taking in less calories than your body needs on a daily basis, and end-up with a calorie deficit. Your body officially in a ‘starvation mode’ and is forced to get the energy it needs from somewhere else. It will break down your own valuable muscle tissue to retrieve energy from its proteins. And yes, you do lose weight on these diets, BUT mostly it will be muscle weight and water weight due to dehydration, NOT FAT! That’s why you will REGAIN weight after you stop these diets. Your body comes out of starvation and immediately starts storing fat in preparation for a possible next starvation period (your body has a memory and adapts to external conditions). That’s also why they call these diets, “yo-yo” diets: when you are on these diets you will lose some weight, when you’re off them you will regain the weight, and many times you will regain more than you initially lost! ALL these diets and programs only result in SHORT-TERM results.

Even more importantly, most of these diets and weight loss programs are UN-Balanced and therefore Un-Healthy! With un-balanced I mean that most of these diets promote the consumption of one food group and restrict the consumption of another…which is all BOGUS! Take Atkins for example (I often use Atkins as an example because most people know or heard about it): It promotes the consumption of meat and restricts the consumption of carbohydrates. In the long-term this drastically increases the risk for cardiovascular diseases, causes ketosis, and results in many, severe micronutrient deficiencies. NO GOOD!

Each time we go on another diet of deprivation, the weight becomes more difficult to lose and we become even more frustrated and discouraged. Then, we eat more and exercise less, causing ourselves more frustration, discouragement and depression.  Soon we find ourselves in this “vicious cycle”. No one can realistically live in the “diet” mode for the rest of their life, depriving themselves of the true pleasures of healthy eating and activity!

Then we think to ourselves…Oh, why bother??  We start to blame ourselves for having no will power when what we really need is a clear, scientifically-based, realistic program that we can follow and get results that are quick and permanent!

Yours in Optimal Health,

Dr. Mike

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Tags: diet, diet plans, Fad diets, Sensible Weight Loss, weight loss programs

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 9:11 am and is filed under Sensible Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.