Weight Loss Should Not Be Seasonal!

[BeeNee]

How many times have you had or overheard this conversation: "...well, the summer is coming up and I need to get beach body ready, so I guess I'll have to go on a diet for the next week and lose 20 lbs." Add to that, how many times through each year and counting have you personally said the same thing whether it be summer, or your birthday, or a reunion, or a wedding? To be clear, going to the gym for such events to pump up a little more here and there is not what I'm referencing, but rather those individuals who every season or event, go on these radical smash diets that they practically kill themselves on for 2-6 weeks only to revert a few weeks later to their same overweight and/or unhealthy selves.

Maintaining a healthy body should not be a temporary fix for a few pictures. It should quite literally become a part of your everyday lifestyle that you can maintain. These smash and fad diets are not designed to last you and put so much stress on you and your body trying to adhere to what, drinking blended up grass juices and saltine crackers and working out 4 hours a day? That's not fun or healthy or realistic for anyone, and yet so many people rely on this method of going nuts and then cycling back to eating poorly and not exercising until the next big event again where they realize they are fat again, and the cycle starts over. They don't call it yo-yo dieting for nothing!

I know I personally don't want to have to keep losing and regaining the same 20, 30, 40, 50 lbs every time something comes up. I don't want to have a whole entire department stores worth of sizes in my closet that I just go up and down like a keyboard. I also don't want to have to shell out money for the next lose it all in 3 weeks plan because I want to go to the beach on vacation for a week. Too many people spend way too much time and money in this vicious cycle of temporary and crazy "fixes," that don't actually fix anything, but rather create more problems and make it that much harder for you the next time, and the older you get, to keep going back to them or keep doing them altogether.

There is NO easy quick fix way to lose weight and maintain your losses. With weight loss, you want to give yourself a fair amount of time to drop the pounds, and in the process, learn how to maintain it. Your life doesn't stop after a three week so called fix diet plan or even a 60 day one. These plans are designed to take the money of gullible people whom they know will either come back to them after another failure or their affiliates the next time they are desperate. You could be spending that money you're wasting with fad diets and plans on a trainer, on a pair of running or walking shoes, on buying whole and fresh foods without tons of ingredients, etc--things that will help you in the long term so you don't have to keep doing this to yourself on repeat. The very definition of insanity applies to yo-yo diets: you do it over and over again expecting different results.

The Worst Things About Fad Diets

1. They cannot be maintained by any sane and rational person with a life

2. Most people not only gain all the weight they lost, back, but gain back more than they started out to lose

3. You should not have to cut out several food groups in order to lose weight (see number 1)

4. Big protein diets work for bodybuilders and athletes, not for the average person sitting at an office desk who barely works out

5. The fine print on those celebrity diet plans makes no guarantees that you will lose the weight, but you will help them buy another New York loft or two or three

6. Repeatedly "having" to diet is not good for the old self-esteem. It makes you constantly feel like a failure because you "have to" keep dieting over and over again and nothing ever works because you refuse to do what we've known forever, a whole foods diet and a basic exercise plan will keep you in shape

7. A long lasting diet should not be impossible to do without the aid of shakes, and pills, and shots, and pre-packaged meals. Our ancestors didn't have or need these things. They had natural diets and naturally worked out. What happens when you go on vacation, or out to eat, or are at a friends house for dinner, or travel remotely, or can't accept a home delivery? There goes your plan.

8. A good diet and exercise plan should not have an end date...2 days, 6 weeks, 90 days. Is that end date your death, because I'm pretty sure you still have to eat and maintain your health afterwards.

9. Fad diets are incredibly destructive for those with mal-absorbtion issues, nutritional deficits, and certain medical conditions because they tend to exacerbate pre-existing conditions in their restrictions of calories and vitamins or certain foods that would actually help improve the health of the persons restricting them to the extreme.

10. They are just plain expensive and dumb.

[ArabianPwincess197]

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