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Meal Replacement Diets
Probably most of us have
been tempted by the apparently easy option of replacing
one or two meals with a specially formulated diet shake
or other type of meal replacement dietary aid.
It's true, they do help you
to cut calories and lose weight if you can stay on the diet
long enough and don't cheat.
Ah, but there's the rub.
It becomes incredibly boring to eat these diet foods everyday
so making it very hard to stay on this kind of diet. The
boredom factor also makes it much more likely that you will
cheat and eat the occasional chocolate bar or doughnut.
On top of that, meal replacements tend to be quite expensive.
Then there is the question
of which meal or meals do you replace? If you are only replacing
one meal with a diet food, it is relatively easy to decide
as lunch is the most obvious. However, if you replace two
meals then that almost certainly means breakfast and lunch.
This seems a little silly when nutritionists agree that
breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It is the
one that is least likely to be stored as fat and it also
kickstarts your body and gives you the energy necessary
to accomplish your tasks for the morning. Miss breakfast
and you are far more likely to eat an unhealthy snack mid
morning.
The major problem with meal
replacement diets is that you may lose weight but how do
you keep it off?
It was unhealthy eating habits
that put the weight on. If you go back to your old ways,
then the weight will creep back with the additional problem
that your body may react as if it has been in a famine.
It will have learnt to work more economically, using few
calories so the excess will be stored as fat.
This is why so many people
can lose weight but can't keep it off, especially on a very
low calorie diet. The combination of going back to old bad
eating habits and the body's defence mechanisms will lead
inevitably to not only replacing all those lost pounds but
may result in gaining even more weight than was lost on
the diet.
The answer to losing weight
and, most importantly, keeping it off is to change your
eating habits. It's not the answer any of us want to hear
but it is the only way. If we have spent years accumulating
excess pounds, it is what we have done to ourselves through
eating more calories than our bodies' need. Once we have
lost the weight, we need to permanently change our diets
so that we eat just exactly the amount our bodies require.
Meal replacement diets are
probably ideal for losing a few pounds put on over a short
time although almost any diet, followed conscienciously,
will do this. For long term dieting to lose a substanitial
amount of weight, a complete revision of eating habits needs
to undertaken, to initially lose the weight and then keep
it off.
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Carol Fisher. All Rights Reserved. |
