Dieting mainly involves ingestion of food in a regulated manner to accomplish weight control and maintaining optimal weight. Mostly people with obesity or overweight try to lose weight through dieting. However, some people such as athletes want to gain weight particularly in the form of muscle. Dieting can help both for losing weight and gaining weight, but the pattern of dieting and the diet itself will differ.
A popular study undertaken in 1950 on weight loss revealed that people taking a restrictive diet lost weight up to 24%, but suffered negative consequences physically and psychologically. They developed depressed mood, irritability and apathy. People who underwent semi-starvation in this study became binge eaters after the experiment was over. They continued binge eating even after attaining their original weight. The link between weight loss dieting and binge eating has been observed in clinical studies. Dieting can increase the risk of bulimia nervosa. An extreme and abnormal weight loss can be attributed to nutritional deficiencies and hypometabolism.
As revealed by a new study, older people on dieting lose muscle in a huge amount if they do not combine exercise with their dieting. Exercise reduces muscle loss. The rate of metabolism is slowed down with loss of muscle. The reason is that more muscle helps more burning of calories. The study involved elder people on only dieting, only on exercise and on dieting and exercise. The study showed that dieting combined with exercise caused loss of more fat and less muscle than in people with dieting only. Exercise with treadmill was taken up for the study as efforts with treadmill was not much.
The above experiment can explain how an individual’s life span is reduced with repeated loss of weight in the absence of exercise. Normally people who go on dieting resume to usual eating after they lose weight first. This results in their coming back to their original weight. Therefore, this makes them again to go for dieting. Actually they become fatter than they originally were. Loss of muscle mass is the main cause of this kind of developments. This means, they have fuller fat cells at the same weight. Such fat cells generate immune stimulant called cytonkines. This causes inflammation which in turn increases the risk of heart problems, stroke, cancer and diabetes. However, other harmful diseases are not ruled out. Medical experts are worried about the repercussions of dieting. Dieting is challenging. It is frustrating. It can be rewarding when combined with exercises, but not alone. .
Using diet pills or weight pills also form part of the dieting agenda. These pills are very harmful. They have only insignificant effect on weight loss. However, when combined with proper input of nutrients and exercises, they can prove to be effective to some extent. In brief, consuming these pills for losing weight is not at all advisable. Many people prefer diet pills only because that the procedure is simple.
Conclusively, dieting alone cannot give good results and instead, can be harmful as you will be losing your energy also together with your weight. The only solution is to be on dieting with enough intakes of nutrients and doing exercises on regular basis.