What are the dangers of dieting? ” You’ve lost weight, aren’t you sick? ” Or : ” What is happening to you ? Why did you lose weight? “Sometimes weight loss seems to be linked to a lack of health and, conversely, being overweight may be a sign of good health. By following a varied and balanced diet, you run no risk, except that of getting better!
What are the real dangers of dieting? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is, as soon as food is touched, a frequent attitude. Alongside those who are ready for anything, i.e. to follow delirious diets or acquire so-called miracle and ineffective or even harmful products to lose weight, there is another category of people who consider the diets in themselves dangerous.
Do we not hear them say that “so-and-so is sick today because she has followed too many slimming programs”, that “thingy pays so much attention to his food that he is going to ruin health », that all methods lead to deficiencies and are therefore perverse, etc., etc. As everything and its opposite is uttered and peddled on this subject, let’s take stock by asking a few simple questions.
Are the deficiencies real?
Among the dangers of a diet, we quite regularly mention the deficiencies caused by the drop in intake. First remark: given the fact that almost all French people do not respect the dietary instructions provided by the various institutes responsible for issuing nutritional recommendations, it must be admitted that the deficiencies exist even without a diet associated, and this in many people.
It is therefore difficult and unfair to incriminate only slimming cures.
My experience has taught me that dieting spells don’t last for the majority of people. Of course, some specialists in the subject “say” to themselves constantly in the “I’m losing pounds” phase, but they are not as really involved as they claim and think.
On average, if I refer to the statistics obtained through my website, I find that about 60 to 70% of Internet users registered to follow a diet do not practice it for more than three to four months.
This explains why in daily medical practice, I have rarely observed significant deficiencies related to dieting. Clearly, the losses in ironTHE weaknesses in vitamin Dthe falls of magnesium, calcium are as common among followers of slimming cures as among those who do not.
In any case, the differences are not worth dwelling on. Also, those who wave this red rag do not always do so for purely medical reasons (food pressure, medical chapels, fads, marketing, press).
The breakdown of food
A tiny part of the population adopts a totally disorganized on the pretext of being on a diet. In this case, of course, she may encounter problems. But aren’t these more psychological (why succumb to irrational methods?) than nutritional?
The true lack of diets is due to the fact that, for marketing reasons for which everyone sees themselves somewhat responsible, we are led to follow different methods from each other, which contribute to breaking down the structure of food, to creating food taboos and tics.
With, the final sanction, the consequence of pushing everyone never to eat as they should or would like to, but according to beliefs or obligations that causedissatisfaction and lead to eating more. However, here again, it is not the regime itself that is to be denounced, but the way in which society digests it badly and goes wrong on its own.
Just think for a few seconds to see how much we we impose restrictions, themselves dangerous, while diets are not inherently so. How many erroneous rumors die hard!
Who has never heard and sacrificed to “you have to eat more during the day than in the evening”“starchy foods are prohibited at dinner”, “you should not eat fruit with meals but rather between meals”, without forgetting the famous and already mentioned “Forbidden to skip breakfast”.
But let’s never stop repeating it: the only effective way to lose weight is to reduce the amount of energy you absorb, without touching the minimum, which could be dangerous, but that has nothing to do with the dangers of a diet that is not easy to put in place compared to the fact of not doing it.
By applying this basic postulate, the success rate will obviously vary from one person to another, depending on the cadencethere patience and the everyone’s motivation. And the results cannot be definitive – apart from a few situations that I will detail later – without close monitoring for long periods of time. But it is therefore not the regimes in themselves that should be denounced.
In case of weight gain?
The notion of “small weight gain” or “moderate diets at regular intervals” may not be as negative as we practitioners have imagined for years.
In truth, we are afraid that the dangers of dieting are not in diets but in diets and the dieting stunts followed by systematic weight regains cause in humans an amplification of fatty tissue which would turn into a fat storage receptacle likely to lead to obesity.
Well, a survey shows no. Carried out by Professor John Deanfield (1,273 people followed over sixty years), published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, this study reveals that losing pounds for a period, even if you then regain it, improves the cardiovascular system.
So in the end weight loss, even temporary, can have long-term cardiovascular benefits. We could therefore consider counting obesity and overweight in “obesity or overweight years”, as tobacco is counted in “tobacco years” in order to assess the dangers.
Like what, a truth or a fear of a day is no longer that of the years to come. In terms of diet as in many others. So, still afraid to go on a diet?