You take a look at yourself in the mirror and immediately whine about how you don’t like the way your body looks. You decide there and then to start on a diet – and take it seriously this time around. Then repeat the same routine the next day. Fast forward a couple of months, nothing happens.
We’ve all been there. It seems that no matter how hard we control our food and avoid those people say we shouldn’t eat, nothing happens. Dieting doesn’t seem to work at all, and we all feel bad and end up just binge eating to look past the heartache. Many people ignore the importance of dietary food intake when it comes to being healthy.
Dieting is still the way to go
Science has proven that more than physical activity, diet plays a more critical role than exercise in weight loss. This is because our body needs a lot of activity to expend energy, but takes the simple, and even enjoyable, habit of eating to gain back that energy. Dieting disallows the body to regain energy while still losing energy in the process – and this leads to weight loss.
Dieting has found to be highly effective especially among those who consistently kept at it, according to a study published in Australia’s Nutrition Journal (https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-7-34).
So what makes dieting work?
All diets revolve around reducing the amount of energy you gain through food while using up the energy your body has stored. Energy in our body is primarily stored in fat. So, it goes without saying that when we decrease our food intake, our body will turn to our fat stores for energy.
Our body needs a minimum amount of energy to run even without doing anything. This is called the basal metabolic rate. This can be estimated through your age, gender, height, and weight. A lot of resources online are available that can quickly compute for your basal metabolic rate. From there, just eat less than this amount. A lot of apps are available that show the number of calories in virtually any kind of food you will eat. Checking for calories may sound like a chore, but after a while, you will develop the habit of quickly estimating them without looking at your phone every time.
Simply put: dieting will only work if you eat less than what you need. After all, you only fill your car until full, why would you fill your body with more than you should?