Time and experience reveal the connections between dieting and health, weight gain, diabetes and heart disease. There are consequences to yo-yo dieting. But if we are implementing healthy eating as a lifestyle, it becomes about making progress and learning new ideas. Over time you learn how to persevere, you learn what foods work for or against your body, you learn about nutrition, and you learn about being in control of your decisions. Lifestyle living is more than losing weight. You learn quite a bit on the journey.
The first connection between dieting and health is yo-yo dieting.
- Due to low calorie restrictions when dieting, your body thinks you’re starving.
- Your body knows fuel is scarce and slows down your metabolism to conserve energy.
- Fat loss leads to decreased levels of leptin, because leptin resides in fat.
- Leptin’s job is to tell your body it is not starving.
- When working correctly, leptin qualms our hunger cues.
- Dieting by skipping meals and eating too low-calorie, causes leptin to signal us to eat more to restock your lost energy supply.
- You can also lose muscle mass during dieting, as well, causing your body to conserve that energy store by lowering metabolism.
- Dieters often regain up to two-thirds of their weight loss within a year and a third end up heavier than they did before they dieted.
Weight gain is another one of the connections between dieting and health.
- Every time you gain and lose, gain and lose, you are increasing your fat mass percentage, which becomes higher than it was before you dieted the previous time.
- During weight gain, fat is regained much easier than muscle mass.
- Fat begins to accumulate around the organs, especially the liver.
- Fatty liver is a condition in which the body stores excess fat inside the liver cells.
- The risk of Type 2 Diabetes increases as fatty liver changes the way the liver metabolizes fats and sugars.
- Data from the CDC at the end of 2024 states, “The prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in the United States is 38%, having increased by 50% within the past 3 decades.
- The estimated NAFLD prevalence among people with type 2 diabetes is 55–70%.
- They further state, “Cardiovascular disease is the main cause of death among people with NAFLD, and the risk of death is significantly higher in people with both NAFLD and type 2 diabetes.”
Diabetes is problematic with cyclical weight gain and loss.
There are several studies that show a history of yo-yo dieting as an indicator of predicting type 2 diabetes. The most significant findings showed this outcome from adults who regained weight after 28 days of weight loss. The issue is that the weight gain was mostly belly fat, which is more likely to lead to diabetes than fat stored in other areas of the body.
A high spike in blood sugar leads to a high spike in an insulin response. Not only is insulin a fat storage hormone, but increased insulin levels can be an early sign of diabetes. The studies that have been done on diabetes and weight cycling (or yo-yo dieting) do show that those who lost and then gained back more weight than they had before they dieted, were more likely to end up with diabetes.
Heart disease is linked to repetitive dieting.
Studies have shown that weight gain versus a steady state of being overweight, increases that risk. One particular study followed over 9500 adults to study heart disease factors. They found that the increase risk of heart disease depended upon the amount of weight swing or fluctuation, meaning the more weight lost and then regained after dieting, the greater the risk.
In fact, several studies showed that large variations in weight over time actually doubled the odds of death from heart disease. Blood pressure is adversely affected by gaining and losing over and over, as well. Not only is yo-yo dieting linked to increased blood pressure, continued weight loss and gain by dieting can alter any healthy effect of weight loss on blood pressure in the future.
Losing weight if you’re overweight, will improve your health.
By losing weight, you will reduce your risk of diabetes, heart disease and the inflammation that drives so much of our current conditions. You just can’t diet in terms of starving yourself through low-calorie eating, because this works against achieving a sustainable, healthy weight.
Losing weight can reverse fatty liver, improve your sleep, reduce your risk of cancer, and many other positive things. You just need to learn how to incorporate healthy eating as a lifestyle. You have to come to terms with the fact that many of the foods we may love contribute to a poor quality of life, often resulting in a decreased life span.
Learn the truth of what specific foods do to your body.
Seek to understand why you keep eating certain foods. Then take steps towards changing that damaging dynamic. This can be difficult, as you will likely grieve the loss of certain foods.
You can’t allow yourself to feel defeated, guilty or hopeless.
It’s not failure if you keep trying. Change one simple thing. Get it down and then move onto the next. If you practice these things, you’re still moving forward. That is what progress looks like.
Weight loss involves a lifestyle change and a journey – you’re expected to have challenges!
You don’t have to be perfect, but you do need to learn to eat healthy as a way of life. Kick dieting to the curb by making some permanent lifestyle changes that will help promote a healthy weight.