If you want to lose weight… STOP DIETING (THIS is how to lose weight WITHOUT dieting!)
Is dieting a good way to lose weight? Absolutey! But is dieting heatlhy? Absolutely NOT. If you’re finding that your diet isn’t making you feel AMAZING and you’re not seeing the results you want, it may be time to switch up your approach. Today, we’re going to show you why dieting can harm your health and even give you opposite results. (THIS is how you lose weight without dieting!)
Why is dieting bad for you?
There are so many reasons that dieting can hurt your health. And the fact is, you don’t have to diet to lose weight. In fact, you may actually lose more weight by not focusing on dieting and weight loss at all! Today, we’re going to give you a quick course in the dangers of dieting and why permanent weight loss happens WITHOUT dieting.
Now, before we get started, let’s just clarify… everyone has a diet, but not everyone is on a diet for weight loss. While we’re all on a diet, what we’re really talking about here is a highly controlled diet that promises weight loss for the sake of losing weight.
Dieting causes wellness decline and sometimes even weight gain.
Well, most traditional or common approaches to dieting are extreme. Extreme calorie and/or macronutrient (carbs, fat, and protein) restriction causes imbalance and unrest throughout the body. Including in the mind. Disorder of the body runs rampant.
Extreme Calorie Restriction
Restricting your calories heavily can certainly make you lose weight quickly, but it has some negative effects, as well. Especially in the long term. Calories are a measurement of energy, and when you don’t feed your body enough energy, it starts to conserve energy. Systems will begin to shut down around the body until only the essentials of life are functioning. This can result in metabolic decline and hormonal imbalances – just to name a couple of the negative effects of calorie restriction.
We aren’t against calorie control, but we do recommend a conservative approach. In The Nutrifitx System, we give you a complete guide to our Goal-Specific Method for weight loss and body recomposition. It teaches you how to reach your goals while maintaining good health. You don’t have to kill yourself just to reach a certain size or number on the scale! 😊
Macronutrient Restriction
The latest craze has been basically eliminating carbs and eating a super high fat diet. Some people even say the opposite, to eat super high carbs and eat very little fat. Then, with some lifestyles, we hear that carbs and fat don’t really matter, it just matters that you eat TONS of protein, because protein burns fat.
That’s not exactly how it works.
When you remove any macronutrient (especially carbs) you lose fiber, vitamins, and minerals. There is no substitute for that. Yes, fat can aid in digestion, but even your veins and arteries need fiber to keep your heart healthy. When you increase your fat, you’re also increasing your risk of high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels (a no-no for metabolic health), as most dieters do not look for healthy fats. When you eat high protein, it’s really hard on your kidneys. Plus, it’s hard to drink enough water and eat enough fiber to counteract that effect.
Without going into detail about every diet, it’s easy to see that these common tactics are actually highly unhealthy. The only reason most of them work is that it rids the body of unhealthy sugars and carbs. You can do that without cutting out carbs.
This type of diet is highly unbalanced. And, if you want to go by nature or what is natural for us, most of the food that exists in nature is carbs. It’s actually not the easiest thing for humans to eat a super high protein or fat diet in the wild.
Not to mention, these tactics are unsustainable – your body wants what it wants, and it wants to be nourished.
The first problem with these tactics is that they only work while you’re following the diet. Once you stop eating that way, you gain all the weight back (and then some). Which isn’t that hard considering that most of what you lose is water weight and muscle.
And, since you’ve been restricting for so long, it’s important to consider the mental factor. Once you start eating the foods you enjoy again, it can be hard to stop. It leads to a non-clinical level of binging (which can, of course, turn into a binge eating disorder in some people).
That binging results in weight gain. This leads to a higher “set weight” (your body’s “comfortable” or “easy” weight). A higher set weight makes it harder to lose weight in your next weight loss cycle. (More about this below…)
This may not sound too horrible yet, but the negative effects go beyond disordered eating and a malnourished body…
Being low in vitamins and minerals may not be of your concern, we get that. It’s what happens when you’re low in micronutrients that will concern you—and beyond that, it’s the long term effects. The following is why you should always strive to lose weight without dieting.
Metabolic Damage
When you diet long term, you slow your metabolism down. Way down. Metabolism is the chemical processes that occur within your body to convert food to energy. To understand your metabolism, you can use the energy balance equation.
TDEE = BMR + PA + TEF + NEAT
Your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is the amount of calories you need to support your BMR (essentially how much muscle you have), PA (physical activity or intentional exercise/movement), TEF (the calories you burn to digest food), and NEAT (calories burned through non-intentional exercise or movement).
The higher your metabolism is, the greater amount of calories (energy) you need to consume to find energy balance.
The TDEE equation is the true equation for weight maintenance. Diets often factor in only calories in and calories out or hitting a specific number of protein, carbs, and/or fat, but healthy weight loss and weight maintenance go far beyond that.
Reducing your calories in and not factoring in your BMR, physical activity, the thermic effect of food, and non-exercise activity thermogenesis, causes metabolic decline.
- It decreases your BMR through muscle burn (instead of fat burn, which increases your metabolism).
- You’re not consuming enough calories, so your energy is super low which means less physical activity and less NEAT.
- You’re eating less, so your TEF also decreases.
All of this together means metabolic decline.
The result of a slowing metabolism is hormonal imbalance, gut health decline, weakened immunity, and more. All together, these things have a negative effect on your sleep patterns, which causes further health decline.
Eating too little calories forces your body to shut down all non-essential processes for life. Your hormonal system, your gut health, and your immune system are not essential to keeping you alive, so your body puts its energy to other processes that do keep you alive.
Dieting results in an entirely disoriented body that results in the total opposite of health:
- Low energy and feeling lethargic
- Weak immune system
- Feeling weaker than you should feel
- Decreased productivity
- Brain fog
- Lack of vibrancy in skin
- And more
The cherry on top: Dieting creates an unhealthy relationship with food.
When you’re constantly restricting, you’re thinking of food as the enemy. Which is big problem, because food is fuel! Constant restriction makes you fear food. And if you’ve been dieting long term, all your body really wants is nourishment—AKA, healthy food in the right quantities and proportions.
For this reason, dieting can (and often does) lead to disordered eating. Disordered eating and an eating disorder are different, but disordered eating can lead to eating disorders. Disordered eating is eating in any way that is restrictive, unnatural, and causes negative emotions and relations to food.
When you finally do start eating food again, the negative emotions you feel toward food can cause you to spin out and binge on the foods you’ve been missing. Binging on food you love creates a positive emotional response to that negative emotional association. This positive emotional response leads to other associations that reinforce emotional eating patterns.
The problem with this is that going through restriction and binge cycles (and the resulting emotional eating) actually increases your set weight over time.
This cycle is exactly why you should try to lose weight without dieting:
- You restrict, you lose weight, you reach your goal, you get comfortable.
- You start to eat, which eventually leads to binging, which leads to weight gain.
- The weight gained during the binge cycle normally exceeds the original weight by several pounds.
- A new set weight is formed that is around 5 or so pounds higher than your original weight (depending on how severe your cycles were, of course)
- It becomes much harder to lose weight and decrease your set weight.
After this, the cycle usually continues, starting with a new diet. Every time you follow this cycle, it becomes harder and harder to decrease your set weight. Starting a new diet to lose even more weight usually means hitting it harder the next time around. That translates to more restriction than before, and even more binging than the last cycle.
The ultimate goal is to STOP DIETING and start listening to your body.
Dieting is NOT a weight loss solution… Dieting is a weight loss TACTIC.
The real solution: Stop trying to lose weight.
The Nutrifitx System focuses on the health of your body. A healthy body means optimizing your metabolism, improving your overall health, and FEELING GOOD! When your body is healthy, it can naturally maintain it’s healthiest weight—and if you have a specific goal, a healthy body can easily reach that goal without dieting and overtraining.
Weight loss in a healthy body looks like body recomposition: increasing lean muscle mass while decreasing body fat percentage. This is a slow process, but it works because it actually BOOSTS your metabolism! A healthy metabolism combined with nutrition education and a deep care for the health of your body results in permanently achieving your ideal weight and FEELING GOOD! You don’t have to focus on losing the weight – you just focus on FEELING GOOD.
This is how you can lose weight without dieting.
If you’re ready to get started on your health journey, check out the Nutrifitx Detox. It’s 100% free! It’s designed to help you reset your body, kitchen, and life and start feeling good. This is the beginning of healing your body, your relationship with food, and your life experience. Our goal is to help you feel vibrant, youthful, confident, and free! Life is meant to be enjoyed, and we want to help get the best experience through a joyful and healthy body and mind.
When you’re ready to take your health to the next level, check out The Nutrifitx System. It has everything you need to find success with health (and makes weight loss an effortless byproduct of your new healthy lifestyle).
