With the new year just around the corner, many people will be making their resolutions. Many of these resolutions will most likely include some sort of goal to get healthier. In order to get healthier many people believe that going on a diet is the most effective way to achieve this goal. This is important because just like most things, while there are good things about diets there are also negatives that come along with being on a diet. The issue with diets is that they do not create a lifestyle change. Diets are often perceived as a tactic to lose weight and get healthy, when in reality they may achieve the desired goals wanted, take too much effort to keep up with, and may not produce a lasting resolution to living a healthy life.
Diets are extremely prevalent in our society as of right now. Some popular 2018 diets include the Whole 30 diet, the MIND diet, the Low-FODMAP diet, and the Atkins diet. When the term diet is used in this essay it does not refer to the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eat, it refers to the act of restricting oneself to small amounts or special types of food for a period of time in order to lose weight. Furthermore, the focus does not include lifestyle, dietary restrictions such as, being gluten free, vegan, or vegetarian. Additionally, fad diets are those that promote weight loss or other health benefits, but usually rely on pseudoscience rather than science when making their claims. The purpose of this essay is to inform the readers that diets possess negative aspects that go along with the positives and to persuade the readers to choose living a healthy lifestyle rather than go on a diet for a short amount of time.
Diets Produce Bad Habits
It is no secret that diets create lots of work. Committing to a new diet restricts a person from eating most foods as well as taking a lot of effort to maintain eating the right food. In a like manner, an experiment was performed on rodents to show that persistent dieting can cause food addiction. In the study, the rats were given normal rat food for five days than unhealthy rat food for two days. The rats quickly preferred the unhealthy rat food, but were put back onto the normal food. This resulted in anxiety and displeasure that were not present before they were even made aware of the unhealthy rat food. When given the unhealthy rat food again, the rat’s symptoms of anxiety went away but they ate too much than they should have. After seven weeks of being on this diet the rat’s brains would reset themselves for higher levels of stress and by making the unhealthy food unavailable the researchers made the rats food addicts (McGonigal 1). This experiment represents human habit of continuous rotation in dieting, to eating unhealthy, and back to dieting again. As seen from the study, and from many other cases, forbidding food causes many issues. By focusing on positive steps, rather than self-denial will decrease a person’s chances to succumb to food-related stress and anxiety.
An opposing view might suggest that eating healthy for a short period of time is at least better than not doing it at all. While that is not necessarily wrong, the issue is that dieting does not equal a healthy lifestyle and causes people to eat more after the diet is finished than normally would be eaten before the diet ever happened. So hypothetically, if a person finishes the Whole30 diet they are not going to feel any guilt eating fried, fattening, and unhealthy foods for the next week because they just spent a month eating healthy. These diets cause people to go from one extreme to another, and result in relapsing into bad habits.
Eating Unhealthy on a Diet
By going on a fad diet, it causes a person to eat a lot of one food group and less of others. Opposingly, you should “Eat a variety of foods to ensure that you get all of your daily nutrients” (“FamilyDoctor”). Furthermore, eating a lot of one type of food group and none of another is bad, but having a little bit of both food groups is not a negative. For example, the Whole30 diet excludes eating beans when they do in fact have health-benefits such as fiber (“The Whole30 Program”). Additionally, there are many Whole30 desserts that are viewed as healthy because they stay within the guidelines of the diet when they in fact are just as unhealthy as a normal dessert would be.
It could be argued that these diets promote staying away from all the unhealthy foods that human beings do not need like processed sugar. That being said, these diets teach nothing about being healthy once the diet is finished. Additionally, the diet deprives the person on the diet of important nutrients, such as fiber and iron (Spritzler 1). These nutrients are extremely important and lower the chances of having heart diseases, cancer, diabetes, and many more ailments. Lots of these diets deny humans from consuming carbs, meat and dairy. These foods can be detrimental to use if eaten in large quantities, but just like any food group, eating the correct amount each day is beneficial.
Diets Do Not Achieve Goals
While a person may lose weight on a diet, it is very likely they will gain it all back. According to Psychology Today, “ ninety-five percent of people who lose weight by dieting will regain it in one to five years.” Diets are only a temporary food plan, so a person is not going to be eating these foods for the rest of their life. After ending the diet and going back to eating normally, the person will most likely binge eat the foods they were not allowed to eat while on the diet, this act is called the Yo-yo effect. The term was named by Kelly D. Brownell, a person achieving the yo-yo effect when dieting, will be successful in losing weight but will be unsuccessful in keeping the weight off and will begin to gain all the weight back. The person dieting will then seek to lose the regained weight, and the cycle starts over again.
Eating should be something humans enjoy. By dieting it takes away all the pleasure of eating. An example of this is when the dieter constantly has to keep track of calories, sugar, and sodium intake rather than just eating. The act of keeping track of everything takes lots of time and effort and can in turn, create more stress on the dieter. Additionally, dieting can be very harmful. According to Psychology Today, “people who diet are 8 times as likely to develop an eating disorder as people who do not.” Once some people start dieting, they will not know when is the healthy point to stop losing weight. Once a person starts losing weight, they will not want to stop and will begin to lose an unhealthy amount of weight.
On the contrary, people think that diets are the only way to lose weight and a guide to being healthy. The problem with this is that diets end. Once the diet ends it leaves people alone with no guide of how to live a healthy lifestyle.
Live a Healthy Lifestyle Rather Than Dieting
By learning the correct amount of food to eat each day, a person will be able to lose weight, but also keep all the weight off. Living a healthy lifestyle is not nearly as hard as keeping up with a diet, but it does involve more than just the foods a person eats. That being said, it is a part of it, it’s important to choose healthy foods. Choose foods that do not have a lot of unhealthy fats, for example stay away from frozen pizzas and fried foods. Also, eat foods with healthy fats in moderation, these foods include oils such as, olive and canola oil. Fish is also good in this area. Next, eat foods that are low in sugar and refined carbs. The last thing is to eat a variety of foods and stay away from processed foods! Additionally, incorporate exercise in your daily life, stay away from unhealthy habits such as, drinking and smoking, and lastly remember to have good hygiene.
Conclusion
In conclusion, diets cause produce habits, cause people to not get all the nutrients they need, and do not produce the goals that the dieter wants or causes the dieter to lose too much weight and be unhealthy. A solution to these issues is to stay away from diets and live a healthy lifestyle by eating the foods discussed and by staying away from unhealthy, processed foods. Additionally, living a healthy lifestyle can be achieved by exercising, having good hygiene, etc.