Sick of the scale numbers going up and down-- and up and down? Wish you could just get to an ideal weight and stay there? Well, I'm sure I'm not the first to tell you this, but I'd like to be the last.
Get off your yo-yo diet! Let me explain why diets don't work.
Most diets deprive your system of one of the areas of nutrition, whether it be carbs, protein or fat.
Your body however, cannot function at its best without a good balance of all three.
Carbohydrates (especially the ones rich in fiber) provide energy for your brain and muscles making it a breeze to go about your day and feel satisfied long after your meal.
This would include foods like: whole-grain breads, cereals and pastas, berries and other fruits, and oatmeal.
It's the fiber in all these foods that expands in your stomach to give you that lasting "full" feeling.
Protein (and more specifically, lean protein) helps build your muscles, which are your own fat-burning machines when properly fed.
It takes your body twice as much energy to break down protein so a) you're burning calories while the protein digests and b) you get fuller faster (and stay satisfied longer) and wind up eating fewer calories.
And the calories you do eat are more productive towards fat burning and not fat collecting.
Incorporate these foods into your diet for better results: fresh salmon, turkey breast (ground or cutlets), chicken breast (strips or cutlets), Canadian bacon, pork loin or 95% lean ground beef.
Fats (either polyunsaturated or monounsaturated) deliver vitamins and nutrients your body needs because it doesn't create them on its own.
Omega-3s are the biggest of them all and the best things about them are that they burn stored body fat and help you look younger (without getting too technical).
Include salmon, tuna, nuts, extra virgin olive oil or canola oil to balance out your diet and give your body a boost.
So you now see the importance of including those foods in your diet.
Let's take a minute and go over what the deprivation of these foods can do to your body.
Low-carb, low-calorie, low-fat diets, they can all do one thing to your body--;stress it out! When the body feels it's not getting enough food, it goes into what I'm sure you've heard as, "starvation mode".
In starvation mode, you body uses less resources to conserve energy (think, not running the air conditioning to save on gas).
This means, your metabolism slows down, burning less calories and less body fat.
Once that happens, your muscle starts to break down since there is no food to feed it.
This will look like weight loss, as it is literally a loss in how much your body weighs as a whole, but since muscle weighs more than fat, what you're reading on the scale is muscle loss and a gain in fluffy fat.
Once you've used up a lot of muscle, you really feel deprived and this is about the time when cheating starts.
You snack on this and that, you may get back on track but chances are you gain weight back quickly, get discouraged, and "get off" the diet.
Sound familiar? Because you don't have muscle to burn off the snack you ate, it turns to fat much quicker.
This is when your mind convinces you that this diet is not working and you need to get off it.
Only thing is, now you eat whatever you want and gain more weight back because you have lost many pounds of muscle, your fat-fighting organs.
This up and down routine with food, digestion, weight loss, and weight gain can really put your body under a lot of unnecessary stress.
On top of all that, stress produces a hormone in your body in attempts to level things out called Cortisol, which is responsible for increasing the much loathed abdominal fat.
To lessen the amount of stress on your body, get better results, and most importantly, live longer, eat a more balanced diet including healthy carbohydrates, fats, and proteins and stay away from yo-yo diets.