THE BEST WEIGHT LOSS DIET

The Best Weight Loss Diet
By Donovan Baldwin

Question: What Is The Best Weight Loss Diet?

In our modern era, especially in America, many people are trying to figure out the best way to lose weight. One weight loss method often presented in popular media and in books by "experts" is dieting. However, each diet which claims to be the best is different from the other diets. This encourages many people to want to know the answer to one particular question:

What is the best weight loss diet?

If I were to answer this question literally and honestly, I would have to say that any diet which claimed to be the best weight loss diet would have to meet two very important criteria.

First: Any diet that you want to put on the list of best weight loss diets would have to actually work to help people lose weight, and work better than most other diet plans or weight loss programs that are out there.

Second, and perhaps even more important: It would have to be a weight loss program or plan that you could stick with.

I already have problems with the term "best weight loss diet" itself, and then I have additional problems with any diet meeting the two criteria I just outlined.

Anything claimed to be among the best weight loss diets already has one strike against it.

Diets Don't Work!

Diets alone are very poor weight loss programs. In fact, relying on a diet, a decrease in food intake, to accomplish your goals can actually backfire on you. People who choose these sorts of programs in hopes of losing weight can actually wind up gaining weight instead. I am going to cover this fact briefly in this article, but I have published another article entitled (Surprise!): Diets Don't Work.  I have posted it on this site, and you can click here to read it before continuing with this article if you wish.

Here's basically what the problem is with any diet.

The human body has developed a built-in mechanism to protect it from starvation. If you drastically cut down on your normal food intake, you will probably lose some weight at first, but, after a short time, the body will automatically reduce its resting metabolic rate.  The resting metabolic rate is the speed with which the body burns calories while you are at rest.  This means that after a while the rate at which you are losing weight will diminish until the weight loss stops altogether.  

Since the second requirement, i. e. the best weight loss diet is something you will stick with, is seldom met, and you know it, you will eventually begin eating like you did before. Unfortunately, your body now needs fewer calories to function, particularly when at rest, so the excess will be stored as fat. People who decide to lose weight with programs claiming to be the best weight loss diets will often find themselves gaining weight once they go off the diet.

People who go through this cycle often, and many overweight people seeking the best weight loss diet do so, are caught in a cycle of yo-yo dieting in which their weight goes up and down in swings but usually creeps upward.

Diet for the Rest of Your Life?

If a diet could work effectively for weight loss, you would have to stay on that diet...eat that way...for the rest of your life! Who the heck wants to stay on a diet for the rest of their lives...or can, for that matter?

Weight Loss Should be for Health

Think about this.

I, personally, would hope that at least one of your major goals with the best weight loss diet, or any weight loss program, is to improve your health as a result of losing weight. 

Well, restricting your nutritional intake also restricts your access vitamins and minerals necessary to health, important phytonutrients found in many foods that you might not eat on a restricted diet, not to mention the carbohydrates which provide energy, the protein which helps rebuild tissue, and the dietary fat, some of which is essential to health and life itself.

Dieting will also cause the loss of lean muscle mass, and lean muscle mass is what fuels your resting metabolic rate.

So, by choosing something claimed to be the best weight loss diet, instead of achieving your goals, you have decreased your body's ability to burn calories, reduced the energy you need to be active for the health and weight loss you desire, and you have deprived your body of vital nutrients it needs for health and vitality as well.

Additionally, You Have Set Yourself Up to Gain Weight Once You Fall Off the Diet Wagon.

A better course of action for you to choose for losing weight in a healthy manner is simply to gradually cut out empty foods such as those sweetened with sugar and heavily processed foods, and opt for more natural meals and snacks. You can also cut down on fats, such as dressings and sauces, and learn to enjoy the more basic food flavors. I say "gradually" to prevent your body from going into starvation mode. It also helps to substitute healthy foods for unhealthy ones. Just for one small example, my wife and I used to love popcorn with extra butter. We found that by switching to popcorn with just butter flavor, not extra butter, we could save 100 calories.

Take a daily multivitamin to make sure you are getting the vitamins and minerals you need to remain healthy both during and after your weight loss program. I say "after" because weight loss is a journey. Once you arrive, you will be able to adjust your lifestyle again to include some enjoyments you have perhaps cut out during the process. Also, if you are exercising for weight loss, which is definitely recommended, you may exercise more to lose weight and cut back on the exercise to a maintenance level once you have reached an acceptable weight.

In line with that, get some regular, moderate, physical activity, and you will soon find that you have little need nor desire to go looking for things that are unhealthy and don't work anyway...such as a so-called "best weight loss diet"!

You also might want to check out my article, Online Weight Loss Programs With Food.

P. S. If you want to learn more about why Diets Don't Work, please click here.

If you want to learn how to burn fat, a great book to read is Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle by Tom Venuto