How To Actually Lose Weight

“Fad diets” have been a big thing for awhile now, but there’s one problem with them – they don’t work. At best, your weight stays the same. But they can have even worse results as well – some of them might actually cause you to lose weight, but at the cost of your overall health.

The Atkins Diet, for example, stresses eating foods high in protein and eliminating carbohydrates. This does lower weight, but it’s where the lost weight comes from that’s the problem. This diet puts your body into “starvation mode”, causing it to burn fat and protein instead of carbohydrates for energy. Burning fat sounds great, but protein – that’s muscle tissue. That’s right; some of the weight loss in the Atkins Diet comes from losing muscle mass. That’s not good at all.

Other diets focus on eating specific foods, such as the infamous “grapefruit diet”, or the “cabbage soup diet”. The problem with these is that they tend to create nutritional deficiencies. No single food has everything your body needs; and what’s worse, some of these food-specific diets aren’t even based on healthy foods. Cabbage soup is pretty bland by itself (as are many soups), so the only way to make it palatable is to add lots of salt, or crackers, or something else. And grapefruit is pretty acidic; overconsumption may lead to stomach aches or heartburn.

Finally, some diets are based on replacing meals with liquid nutrition formulas, such as slim fast. The problem with primarily liquid diets (apart from the fact that they’re often very expensive, and not very filling either) is that they can really mess up the regularity of your digestive system. But perhaps the biggest problem with almost all fad diets is that they’re marketed as a “quick fix”.

There is no quick fix to weight loss. It’s really hard to lose substantial amounts of weight and keep it off. Depending on how much weight you want to lose, doing so permanently while still remaining healthy overall can take months or even years. It sucks, and you will feel horrible for awhile. Here’s the only real solution to healthy weight loss; it’s simple in theory but very difficult to carry out in practice:

1) Eat right.

2) Exercise a lot.

Yep, that’s it. Eat only modest portions of fresh fruit and vegetables, lean meats, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products; and get plenty of aerobic and anaerobic exercise throughout the day. Don’t starve yourself, don’t focus on one food or food group, and don’t drink formulas or pop a bunch of pills. If all this sounds too difficult, and you still want a quick fix, or you’re not concerned with being healthy but merely losing weight; there is one option that’s virtually guaranteed: take incredibly large amounts of methamphetamines. The pounds will shed from your body like butter sliding off of a hot biscuit, and you’ll feel amazing…until you die from an overdose, or have all your teeth fall out and go into withdrawal convulsions.