Ughh I hate these things. Seriously, I will angrily rant if
brought up in conversation.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I mean by ‘fad diets’
are fat flushes, detoxes, liquid diets, all of that nonsense that gets you to
not eat real food for 3 days in order to “remove toxins from your body.”
Okay, what? Seriously, what does that even mean? I have
never done a detox in my life and I do not feel any ‘toxins’ floating around in
there. I live a pretty healthy life, and I think that’s all we really need to
do.
And that’s really my whole point. Why do we feel compelled
to subject ourselves to starvation once a month because we think we’ll drop a
dress size? Because really, it doesn’t work that way.
So here’s how it does work:
Your body has a certain rate at which it burns calories just
to keep itself alive. This varies based on your body composition and physical
activity level. This counts for about 65% of the total calories you burn on a
daily basis. That’s like, a lot. The other 35% is all the little stuff like
walking to your car, taking the stairs, getting a snack… and working out, if
you’re into that. It all pretty much evens out when you have a consistent
amount of calories going in. Any extreme drop in caloric intake will send the body
into survival mode. Since fat stores are vital for living, the body will
naturally do anything to hold on to as much as it can. So if you go on one of
these “fat flushes” for too long, your body will decrease the amount of
calories it burns to live by up to 15%. That means you’d have 15% more calories
to burn on your own and that just sounds like a waste to me. AND once you go
back to eating normal food you just naturally won’t burn as much as you used to
and that’s when you start packing on the lbs.
My point is; do this instead. Clean your diet up a little
bit. The FDA recommends a calorie distribution of 20-30% fat, 15-25% protein,
and 50-65% carbohydrates. Tell me you can get that from a liquid diet and I’ll
show you a liar.
I’m not into restrictions or any “eat this not that” thing.
I’m all about eating really well 80% of the time and then every once in a while
going for that slice of double fudge chocolate cake because dammit, life is
short. In doing this, you won’t feel limited. Not only will eating well make
you feel good, like, really good, but having that cake will also make you feel
reeeeally good, without the guilt.
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