Weight Loss Essays - Obesity, Diets, Dietetics,

Weight Loss About one-third of Americans are extremely over-weight, which may be why crash dieting is beginning to plague America. It's estimated that Americans alone spend 80-100 billion dollars on weight loss tactics. People go on these diets to get quick results but are these results hurting them more than helping? The answer is Yes! The only way to safely and effectively lose weight is through old-fashioned exercise and the right diet. You cannot successfully lose weight by simply cutting food from your diet or taking some pills, it is necessary to work for your results. Without depriving your body of necessary nutrients through dieting, you can lose fat and get the body you've always dreamed of, or at least one you're more comfortable with. The quote "The effects of the current obsession with dieting can be devastating", said by Mr. Woodworth, a long time exercise and nutrition expert, summarizes the dangers of dieting. The many dangerous methods of losing weight: so called "dieting" or starvation/fad diets, pills and drugs, over-exercising, surgery, and eating disorders, have taken many casualties. Many people go on "diets", a word so commonly misused, to get quick results of weight loss. Perhaps the most common is minor starvation and fad dieting. This method is when people become over concerned with calorie intake. Many deaths have been associated with low calorie diets. By trying to shed pounds simply by cutting all fat from the diet greatly increases the risk of getting cancer, heart disease, and other health problems. That "low-fat" trap gets people hooked on reduced-fat snacks or possibly not eating at all. So now the body is being deprived of necessary nutrients not available in any pill or liquid form. Yes cutting fat and cholesterol reduces the risk of heart disease and diabetes, but nutrient poor diets have an even larger risk of getting those diseases along with many others. Of course a large percent of dieters will lose weight but they will feel depressed afterward and gain back even more than before they started the diet. The reason why is because they are losing "healthy" weight along with the fat they were hoping to rid of. In an infomercial with Tony Little, he showed a graph of what the body loses when someone goes on a diet. By cutting back on foods, the body becomes deprived of very important nutrients. Then when it seems you are losing weight, what you are actually losing is fat AND MUSCLE. Many times, more lean muscle than fat will be lost. And although they may look slimmer because their size is smaller, they are actually weaker and more susceptible to injuries due to losing "healthy" weight. Healthy weight is muscle and bone weight, the things that support your structure and enable you to perform rigorous activities. A lot of the time "healthy" weight is misinterpreted, especially in females. Which leads to an amazing fact that 62% of women and 44% of men that are dieting aren't even overweight! But they are misled when they step on the bathroom scale and "My God" look what it says! They are not realizing that muscle outweighs fat over 2:1. Therefor, many people may think they are fat even though they may be healthy. I myself am an example of that. On a height and age chart it says my ideal weight for my height is 155 pounds. I am 168, so does that mean that I am overweight? Not necessarily. Charts and stuff are made for averages and trends because when doing a body fat testing I had only 10.8% body fat which is below the average for people my age and size. So the bathroom scale scares many people into believing that they need to lose weight when it may not be necessary. On top of overweight people dieting we also have healthy people dieting, both of which are extremely dangerous. Thus, the fad diet/starvation method should be completely avoided because simple "dieting" is just a stepping stone that may lead to much more serious things that become life changing or life threatening.. What started as a simple "diet" may have progressed into another dangerous way of losing weight through pills or drugs and eating disorders. How wonderful it would be if we could all take a couple of pills a day and not worry what else we may eat all while obtaining that body we yearn for. Unfortunately, we don't have that pill and probably never will so avoid the dangerous imitations out there. What is not told