Getting Fit: Yo-yo diets won’t end bad habits
When you hear the term Yo-Yo, I am not trying to get your attention.
It is a dieting term that promotes fat gain not fat loss. It is this up and down weight loss that eventually promotes fat gain not fat loss.
Every one of us has been on this type of diet and not even realized it. These diets are normally very boring and dangerous to your body.
They involve special diet foods or types of foods that promise to miraculously change your physique to resemble a Swedish lean mean fighting machine. This fallacy is due to the intentions of the author to generate a profitable margin on the sale of his book.
Yo-Yo dieting does not instill a permanent and healthy change in your eating habits. Most of us will go back to our old eating habits once we have finished the fad diet.
This type of dieting lowers the body’s metabolism. A low metabolism will cause the body to shift gears into a type of starvation phase sensing the need to conserve calories in order to survive. This mode of starvation can stay in effect for up to several months after the fad diet has been completed causing even more weight gain on fewer calories. This is why you keep gaining inches while you are eating less.
When you diet, the body’s metabolism becomes lower. This causes the body to conserve energy, and in essence stores any food intake to fat cells for future energy needs.
The Yo-Yo diet negatively increases the overall percentage of body fat, and decreases lean muscle tissue in the body.
Quick weight loss destroys muscle tissue while preserving and increasing fat storage.
When you begin to eat after you diet the weight comes back in the form of fat.
Every time you go on a diet the body losses muscle and regains more fat than what you originally started with causing a Yo-Yo effect of up and down fat tissue weight gain. This will increase fat storage and decrease lean muscle.
The cure to this problem is to maintain daily healthy eating habits by replacing excess fat in your diet with complex carbohydrates, protein, and getting off the couch to exercise every day.
Today is the beginning of your new you, and today we are going to do this and you are going to see it all the way through.
Q&A
Jeff Anselmo, McMinnville TN
Q: I like to walk with my family in the afternoon. With the various age ranges of my family I was curious if we all benefited the same.
A: Yes, all of your family members are getting great benefits not only from the exercise but more importantly from the quality time spent together.