Fitness and Dieting

In today’s fitness and weight obsessed world, watching one’s diet is nearly always key in maintaining a healthy body type. There are literally thousands of diets out there to choose from, and without proper medical consultation, one should be wary to embark on any diet that demands any drastic dietary or lifestyle changes.
Still, there are certain tried and tested means by which one can ensure healthy and balanced nutrition. When it comes to dieting, nothing get’s your metabolism up and running like a wholegrain, low fat breakfast accompanied by plenty of water to lubricate your system after a sound night’s sleep. Periodically filling up on water also causes us to feel less ‘peckish’ and thus curbs the tendency to snack.
Since our bodies are designed to survive, rapid loss of weight causes the body to go into ‘starvation mode’- this essentially means that our metabolism or the rate at which your body burns energy lowers itself considerably. The result is, that, other than an initial rapid loss of mass (consisting primarily of body fluid and muscle tissue), further weight loss becomes very difficult. Because the body is looking to survive, it tenaciously holds on to fat reserves when you starve yourself, which is fair to say, quite counter productive to losing weight! Restrictive calorie diets are not only unhealthy, but challenging to maintain and hence unsustainable in the long run. Weight gain could not only be the result of eating the wrong types of food, but simple eating too much food and thereby consuming more than your body requires. Hence counting calories is important in regulating how much one burns in relation to how much one consumes, but over-counting is detrimental to weight loss.
It is essential to keep your metabolism up while dieting- and this can be achieved through mild weight training to maintain muscle mass required for burning calories. Staying active automatically facilitates losing weight. Thus, to lose weight and to keep it off for as long as possible, always combine dieting and exercise.
So avoid extremes- and be conscious instead of obsessive- Balance is most definitely the key to healthy and happy life and by extension the key to a nutritious diet and healthy dieting!