Dieting - it’s bad for you by Karen Harris- Wakenshaw

Health and fitness, diet and exercise, they go together like fish and chips, and sponge and custard. Unfortunate metaphors they may be, but we all know by now, food and health are inextricably linked. To keep ourselves healthy, we should restrict our calorie intake, eat the ‘right’ foods and keep fit with exercise.Diet - what does that word conjure up to you? Months of tedium, eating nothing but grapefruit and ‘rabbit’ food? Well, wrong, that’s dieting, and this may be music to your ears, but it’s bad for you.

 If you restrict your calorie intake or skip meals - especially breakfast - your metabolism will decrease, your body mechanisms will shut down, you will store fat and your body will start burning energy from your muscles to compensate.

There are guidelines for calorie intake, with factors such as daily activity, height, weight etc, to consider, that really only a fully-equipped fitness expert, doctor, or health professional, can advise on accurately.

I was amazed to read recently, that 4 out of 10 primary school children in Paphos were classed as obese, what has happened to the healthy Mediterranean diet that has been aspired to for years? Children’s obesity is really alarming, it has nearly doubled in 10 years, in the UK, 1 in 5 children (aged 2-15 years) are now obese. Other equally alarming facts;

 If current tends continue, by 2015, 700 million people worldwide, will be obese and 23 billion people will be overweight.

In the UK, 1.06 million prescription items were dispensed for the treatment of obesity, eight times the number in 1999.

 In the USA, the cost of obesity and its associated conditions is $99.6 billion. What a scandalous waste of money.

 Try and get your head round those figures, they are staggering. So, after reading all of the above why, in the name of all that is gooey and chocolate-y, am I telling you not to diet?

 We think of a diet as something we ‘go on.’ A holiday looms, your weight has crept up over the winter, so you ‘go on’ a diet; big family event looming, oops, weight has crept up since the holiday, best ‘go on’ a diet. And so it goes on, up and down goes the weight, but mostly, over time, it goes up. That’s because deprivation diets, and fads like eating nothing but grapefruit, or soup, or those horrible ‘meal-replacement’ shakes, stress your body so much that it responds by trying even harder to store fat, especially around your belly. Belly fat is a pretty dangerous thing to have; it comprises of subcutaneous fat (fat that lies under your skin) and visceral fat (fat that lies beneath your stomach muscles and surrounds your vital organs). Visceral fat will cause long term damage.

 So, both dieting, and over-eating, are bad for your health. The only long-term solution to sustainable health and fitness is healthy eating and regular exercise. 

 Karen Harris-Wakenshaw  Fitness professional.

 Telephone: 0533 847 2602  website: www.k-fit.biz