Is Going on a Diet Bad for your Health?

If you're carrying too much extra weight, this clearly isn't good for your health, as it puts more pressure on your heart and can make life more difficult. Thus, you might think that it's a good idea to go on a diet to help you lose weight and improve your health prospects, but is this really the healthiest option? It depends what you mean by 'going on a diet.' Many people find themselves following a ridiculously restrictive diet, which they can only stick to for a few weeks, before giving up, feeling bad, and regaining any weight they lost. This is usually how a lifetime of yo-yo dieting begins.

It might be worth trying to lose weight if it is likely to affect your health, but you want to go about it in a sensible way, rather than eating such a limited amount and range of foods that your body is deprived of essential nutrients and you're left feeling so hungry that it is a struggle to get to sleep at night. When you're hungry you became increasinly aware of all the food that you're supposedly not allowed and this is when you can become fixated on certain foods and start to crave all the foods that are high in calories, fat and sugar. The chances are that eventually you will give into temptation, and then you will cave in altogether.

The trouble is you feel guilty for cheating on your diet, but having done it once, you can find it much easier to do so again. Even though you may lose weight rapidly by following a restrictive, low-calorie diet, it tends not to be sustainable in the long run. When you have a timeframe of a few weeks or months to lose a lot of weight, it is easier to focus on sticking to a rigid diet plan, but as soon as the weight loss slows down; you reach your initial target; or life simply gets in the way, any attempts to stick to the diet generally go out of the window. Unfortunately, you can find yourself regaining weight as quickly as you lost it.

Thus, you are hardly likely to enjoy the health benefits of being a healthy weight if you only manage to keep the weight off for a short period of time and only lost the weight in the first place because you virtually starved yourself. It is hardly ideal to be overweight, but it is still possible to be fit and to eat healthily, which is not the case when you have no energy to do anything because you're eating so little and fantasising about all the foods you could be eating. It's not good for your mind or your body to follow a diet plan that deprives you of essential nutrients and if the outcome of your weight loss is that you're only going to regain the weight you lost and perhaps put on even more, it hardly seems worth the effort!