DIETS! Don't waste your time or money!

January is a time of year when diet companies really take advantage of people! Everyone wants to lose weight quickly and as you may have seen already this January many different diets are flooding our social media, televisions and magazines all promising one thing! Easy, quick weight loss!

I watched a programme last night, many of you may have watched this too, it put different diets to the test trying to find out which one is best, which one helps you lose the most weight and which is the easiest to follow. I can understand that this programme is trying to show us what diets and weight loss gimmicks are a waste of time and money and gives the viewers an idea of what each diet entails. However I feel that programmes like this just should not be allowed, we should not be telling the general public to follow diets as it is harmful. None of these diets are healthy, none of them work for the long term and you are more likely doing more harm to yourself (body and mind) by following them! Restricting a whole food group out of your diet can be extremely detrimental (Unless you have a genuine medical condition), reducing your calorific intake to next to nothing will leave you feeling tired, hungry and miserable and diets that state 'eat cereal for two meals a day to lose weight' are just plain crazy, how is this healthy? You need to ask yourself, where does this information come from? Unfortunately watching programmes like this on television and knowing it has been viewed by hundreds of thousands really makes me anxious as it is sending out the wrong message, that we should be following diets to lose weight and that we are just waiting to find the 'magic one'. Yes these types of programmes show people to be loosing a substantial amount of weight in relatively short periods of time, but what they don't tell you is where that weight has come from. The majority of weight lost will be water and muscle weight, as most of the diets do not contain much protein, you probably haven't lost much fat at all, and this is the stuff we want to shift. We should be promoting healthy eating and exercise not fad diets to help people reduce their weight and burn fat.

I think anyone who has been properly educated in human nutrition and studied nutrition at a high level will agree with me on this one, diets are a waste of time, a waste of money and are not going to fix your weight issues. Weight loss/fat loss only happens when you truly want to make some real lifelong changes to your diet and lifestyle. Ensuring you eat a broad range of foods, including fruit and veg, complex carbohydrates, lean proteins and fats and drink plenty of water every day along with becoming more physically active is the key. This is the only way you will lose weight/fat in a healthy, sustainable way and keep it off for the long term without depriving yourself of the benefits of all macronutrients and micronutrients we need in our diet to stay healthy. The truth is there is no magic pill or supplement, no trick of the trade and health doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune on the newest trendy 'health food'. I can completely understand how health and nutrition can be so confusing with all this misleading information but it doesn't have to be. If you really want help with changing your lifestyle please contact someone who is properly qualified and don't fall into the hands of the next fashionable diet out there.

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