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Wellness Coach Deborah Kesten explains how dieting alters a woman's body.
Deborah Kesten:
It usually works inversely. I know many people keep thinking, “I have to diet and force this willpower onto my life.” And one, it affects the quality of your life and every moment of it to fill your whole being up with thoughts about deprivation and what you can’t have, and very often self-dislike, disappointment with self, self-hatred. And what happens when you diet is one, your body does not know that you are cutting back to get into your size 4 Calvin Klein jeans, so your metabolism slows down because it thinks it’s going to starve.
So that’s part number one. Two, unless you are doing a lot of exercise you are also losing muscle mass when you are dieting, and it’s muscle mass, it’s your muscles that move and burn energy. That’s why men tend to lose weight more easily. They have more muscle mass than women just because of the way males are built in comparison.
So, when you diet, you are slowing down your metabolism. You are not getting the vitamins and minerals you need building, meaning you are going to start craving food and certain food, it’s usually sweets, and you are also destroying muscle mass because that’s where a lot of the calories are being taken from your muscles. So it just sabotages you.
There’s been studies done on goal weight. “I have a goal weight,” and the more unrealistic a goal weight, meaning, “I want to look like I did and weigh like I did as when I was 16 years old,” the less likely a woman is to achieve any weight loss at all and go, “Oh, what the heck.”
About Deborah Kesten, M.P.H.:
Deborah Kesten, M.P.H., is an international nutrition and lifestyle researcher and educator, with a specialty in preventing and reversing obesity and heart disease. She was the nutritionist on Dr. Dean Ornish’s first clinical trial for reversing heart disease through lifestyle changes, and Director of Nutrition on similar research at cardiovascular clinics in Europe. More recently, she has created the pioneering Enlightened Diet, a “whole person” optimal eating and weight loss program, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. With more than 200 published health articles, she is the award-winning author of The Enlightened Diet, Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul and The Healing Secrets of Food, a comprehensive, evidence-based nutrition program about the power of food to heal physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.
Visit Deborah Kesten at her website