Diet vs Lifestyle Change – Part 1

Do you know the difference between a diet and a lifestyle change? For many people the differences aren’t as important as a plummeting weight loss or fitting into the bathing suit or dress. But others have recognized that when you ‘diet’ you commit to changing your nutritional intake for as long as it takes to lose weight. But when the weight finally comes off you return to your old habits.

And it was your old habits that brought you to the point where you wanted to lose weight in the first place.

So, as you might imagine, diets do not work. What does work is making permanent lifestyle changes that result in weight loss, overall improved health and no rebound weight gain. Too many times people are sucked into the promises of quick loss with fad diets that don’t provide enough nutrition to support a health body and deprive the individual of foods they truly love and appreciate.

This deprivation oftentimes will lead to termination of the diet and returning to the old nutritional habits. Unfortunately, this can also lead to an increase in weight above what the individual lost in the first place. And the reason a person puts on more weight has a basis in physiology.

When a person originally loses weight they often lose lean muscle mass because of the nutritional mistakes they make using fad diets, too little calories or depriving the body of the fuel it needs to survive. When the individual finally gets tired of being tired, over exercising or depriving themselves of their favorite foods and activities they turn back to their old habits, but in an overabundance. In other words, they over eat, over indulge and forget about the workouts.

This reversal in nutritional intake results in a weight gain of fat instead of the lean muscle mass they originally lost. The weight gain is often more than they lost because of the rebound effect and because the fat they gain burns less than lean muscle mass. The metabolic rate of the fat is also lower than the muscle mass which means that it takes a lower amount of calories to gain back the weight they lost and then some.