HEALTHY EATING - Everything You Need to Know About Dieting

By Douglas Robb 

Do a Google search of the word “diet” …and you will get approximately thirteen bazillion hits. Thirteen bazillion articles and websites created by thousands upon thousands of individuals & corporations who are trying to sell you their miracle solution to your weight loss dreams…all for the low, low price of….over $60 billion per year

In today’s post, I am going to start laying out a weight-loss framework that will…

• tell you everything you need to know about dieting,
• help you understand the theories behind any diet,
• help you design a diet that works for YOU, and
• not spend any money

To begin with, we’re going to divide ALL of the possible dieting methods into their 2 main camps.

1. Eat Less
2. Burn More

Then, we’re going to break down these two main dieting philosophies into their numerous sub-categories, and so on and so on…until you are a veritable expert on diets and weight loss.

Let’s begin…

Eat Less

Eat less food and you WILL lose weight. This is the basis for most diets.

It’s a simple theory, based on the concept that energy can neither be created nor destroyed…and as a result, if you consume less energy (food), you have to lose the exact same amount of body-fat.

Unfortunately, as every seasoned dieter knows, our bodies are stubborn about holding onto our fat and that unless we are willing to keep dropping caloric intake until we are literally starving ourselves, we need to tweak the Eat Less theory of dieting if we want long-term success.

To that end, here are the major sub-categories of Eat Less dieting techniques.

Structured Diets

This category dominates the weight loss industry. In fact, when I say the word diet, structured calorie-reduction diets are what everybody thinks of.

Whether it’s a soup diet or a cabbage diet or a detox diet or a juice diet or any of the other  79 different types of diets that Wikipedia categorizes, the theory is the same. Eat Less.

How you do it is nothing but a marketing ploy. They are all the same.

Behaviour Modification Techniques

From 1895 to 1919, a man named Horace Fletcher popularized a method of eating that promised weight loss, greater health and an abundance of energy. His practice was called Fletcherizing.Practitioners of his method were called Fletcherizers. The secret of his method – chew each bite of food until it liquifies in your mouth. In 2008, a modified version of this technique is part of Paul McKenna’s “I Can Make You Thin” program.

The idea is that by chewing your food until it is liquid, you cause the satiety centers in your brain to send out the “I’m full” signal before you have eaten too many calories. While the focus is still on reducing caloric consumption, you don’t have to actually count calories.

Another version of behaviour modification technique comes from the field of psychology. Psychologists (see Judith Beck) are teaching cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to clients trying to lose weight.

Appetite Suppressants

Attempts to suppress appetite have been around almost forever. In the 1800s, tree sap & camphor tea were thought to suppress appetite. Ice water is purported to both suppress appetite and increase short term metabolism. Along the same lines, soup based diets (see Cabbage Soup diet) claim to suppress appetite.

Other methods of appetite suppressant include dietary fibre (see food & supplements), homeopathic & aromatherapy preparations, herbal appetite suppressants (see Hoodia Gordonii), and synthetics like fen-phen.

Once again, caloric restriction is the goal…the only difference is the method of restriction.

Diuretics & Laxatives

These two methods of weight loss have a long and undistinguished history. In the 1800s, dieters used Potassium acetate (diuretic) and chalk (laxative) for rapid yet temporary weight loss. Commonly used as a last ditch effort to lose weight FAST, laxatives and diuretics come in many forms.

While most natural diuretics, like asparagus and cranberries, have a relatively safe and gradual effect on body fluids, herbal products like ephedra, horsetail and dandelion root along with synthetic products such as lasix and aldactone have a much more powerful and potentially dangerous effect on fluid levels and your kidneys.

Like the diuretics, laxatives come in varying strengths and from both natural sources like coffee, senna leaf, and aloe vera as well as from synthetic sources like Tegaserod. Like diuretics, laxatives can have serious side effects when abused.

Fat Blockers & Carb Blockers

Fat and Carbohydrate blocking supplements are designed to stop either dietary fats or carbohydrates from being absorbed by your digestive system. The theory is that “blocked” fats and carbs pass straight through your digestive track without being used for energy or stored as body-fat. With this technique, we’re not focusing on caloric consumption, we’re looking at caloric absorption. If your body can’t absorb the calories, it can’t store them as body-fat.

Bulimia & Anorexia

Bulimia and Anorexia are the only methods of weight loss currently recognized in the AMA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as eating disorders. Other forms of disordered eating, such as binge eating, while not recognized as mental illnesses by the psychiatric industry, are still very serious medical conditions. To engage is these behaviours is dangerous.

Bariatric Bypass Surgery

Bariatric or Gastric Bypass surgery is the catch-all phrase for the different types of surgical procedures designed to treat obesity by altering the G.I. tract and consequently reducing the amount of food eaten and/or absorbed by the patient. As of April 2008, there are at least 8 different types of Gastric Bypass surgeries.

And all of them are designed to get you to ingest lower amounts of calories and thereby induce weight loss.

Like all surgeries, Gastric Bypass surgery is not without risk. On top of the surgical risk, the success of this procedure is not guaranteed. Recent research has shown a genetic component to the success of Gastric Bypass surgeries.

Scientific Research

As science learns more and more about our bodies, the search for effective weight loss moves farther away from diets, behaviour modification and diet pills and towards anti-obesity vaccines targeting various hormones (leptin, ghrelin, pyy, agrp, etc…) and genetic research.

While the search for a genetic answer to obesity is very exciting, it seems like for the present, genetic research into obesity is creating more questions than answers. I will be following this research closely and will be posting as new developments come to light.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, all of the different weight loss methods available today fall into two camps, Eat Less and Burn More. This post served as a general introduction to the “Eat Less” methods of weight loss.