DIET

 


There are literally hundreds of diets and dieting products available to try today and while some of them work well, others are simply fads that are later shown to have no effect on the body at all. Diets can be broadly broken into three groups:  

        Calorie controlled
        Fat controlled
        Carbohydrate controlled  

The aim of each diet is to restrict the amount of calories, fat or carbohydrates you eat each day so that you use more than you take in. Some of these diets are quite controversial while others can be seriously unhealthy if they are continued for any length of time. A sensible diet however can help you to lose weight and when an exercise regime is followed at the same time, the benefits are often twofold.  

Calorie Controlled Diets  

Counting the calories you consume is a very effective way of controlling your diet and loosing weight. In order to loose weight, your calories intake from food and drinks has to be lower than the number of calories you burn throughout the day. On average, men use 2500 calories a day while women use around 1900. This means that to stay at your present weight you would have to consume that many calories during the day.   If you want to lose a small amount of weight fairly quickly then you need to reduce your calorie intake quite dramatically – say to 1500 for men and 1000 for women. If however you want to lose a substantial amount of weight it is much more effective to lose it steadily over a longer period of time and in this case you should reduce your daily calorie intake to around 1900 for men and 1500 for women.  

Fat Controlled Diets

  

All food contains some fat and as you do need some fat in your diet this is a good thing. Fat provides insulation to the internal organs, warmth and energy and so cutting it from the diet completely is not healthy. Low fat diets can be beneficial for those with high cholesterol, heart problems and gastrointestinal complaints such as heartburn and indigestion.  

The recommended daily amount of fat that your normal diet should contain is 95g for men and 70g for women. Some extreme diets tell you to drop these figures by up to 90% however as a general rule of thumb you should aim to get between 20-30% of your daily calories from fat. This means that if you consume 1500 calories a day, you should be looking to eat around 45-50g of fat. It is okay to drop to 20% of your daily calories coming from fat if you feel the need to however this tends to restrict the number and types of foods you can eat and the low fat diet quickly becomes monotonous.  

Carbohydrate Controlled Diets   Carbohydrates should make up around 50% of your daily food intake because complex carbohydrates provide us with energy and are vital to the functioning of the body. It is simple carbohydrates (sugars) that are unproductive calories and these can be dropped from the diet without any adverse effects.  

Possibly the most famous example of a carbohydrate controlled diet is the Atkins diet. This involves cutting all carbohydrates from the diet so that stored fat is used as energy. Unfortunately this doesn’t constitute a healthy diet and after a while the body enters starvation mode whereby the fat is conserved and muscular protein is used as an energy source instead. You can lose weight quickly with carbohydrate controlled diets however there does come a point when the body begins to store fat in preference to muscle.   Saying this, there are a number of healthy low carb diets, many of which are used by athletes as they often have high protein contents as well. It is possible to lower your carbohydrate intake without cutting from the diet all together. Some diets allow you to eat carbohydrate foods on some days but not on others so that the body uses fat on the days when it gets no carbs but it doesn’t become starved of them.  

Exercise and Diets

  

Exercise goes hand in hand with a healthy diet and the results you get will be much more significant than if you remain sedentary. For example, a healthy diet will allow you to consume around 1300-1500 calories (women) per day and this will enable you to lose weight. By doing 20-30 minutes of physical exercise each day you can burn off around 200-300 calories, depending on the type of exercise you choose. This means that your body only has around 1100-1300 calories to live on a day and any additional calories that you require will come from the body’s stores. For the first few days you will use up the small amounts of carbohydrate reserves within the body but following that you will begin to use the fat store – which is the result you want.  

Choosing a Diet

  

The bad thing about some diets is that the body remembers them. This is why most diets don’t work second time round. If you starve your body of carbohydrates, the body remembers this and automatically starts to store fat i.e. starvation mode, if you try the diet again. This means that not only will you not lose weight; you could end up gaining it.   The most sensible type of diet is a calorie controlled diet that is combined with regular exercise. These types of diets can be carried on long term without any ill effects and after a while they simply become a way of life.