WHY TAKING DIET PILLS IS A MISTAKE

Recently I read a blurb on AOL discussing the various diet pills that are available, so I felt compelled to address this issue.

Most people agree that it’s lack of discipline that makes dieting so difficult. This perception is what drives many to try diet pills. After all, if you’re not hungry than you eat less and lose weight. This should be the perfect solution — or is it?

Why is taking diet pills a mistake? It works doesn’t it! Yes, it works, but I doubt that you’re going to take these pills for the rest of your life. So what happens when you stop taking these pills? Since most of the changes that occurred during your weight loss period were a result of appetite suppression, no real dietary changes have been established, which means you’ll go right back to the way you always ate before, and you’ll not only put the weight you lost back on, but usually some additional pounds as well.

Unfortunately, this is inevitable. When you lose weight quickly through relative starvation, then for every pound you lose, you lose half a pound of muscle. Since our basic metabolism (the amount of calories we burn a day not taking exercise into account), is based on lean body mass (the mass of our body without the fat), then the amount of calories you will now burn on a daily basis will be reduced. For example, a twenty-pound weight loss through major calorie restriction results in a loss of ten muscle pounds causing a reduction of 125 calories burned per day. That’s because you burn approximately 12.5 calories per lean body pound (12.5 x 10 = 125). Every time you diet with a method equivalent to severe calorie restriction, you will lose muscle mass and continue to make it harder for yourself to lose weight in the future.

Diet pills teach you nothing about changing eating habits, and the weight loss they cause is detrimental in the long run to your overall health.

Read the first two chapters of A Novel Diet on this Web site and learn about the first steps you need to take to begin doing it right.