A healthy diet is the best way to lose weight. It is more likely to make you feel satisfied and energized. While unhealthy diets put restrictions on your eating habits, healthy diets help you learn how to make nutritious, low-calorie choices you can live with to keep the weight off for a lifetime. While regaining lost weight is always possible, adopting healthy habits is more likely to bring you success for the long-run.
Dieting Basics
A pound is equal to 3,500 calories. If you can burn 500 calories more per day than you eat, you will lose 1 lb. per week. Making low-calorie food choices, moderating portion sizes and increasing physical activity are ways to create this deficit. The New England Journal of Medicine published a study in its February 26, 2009 issue that compared diet plans featuring various ratios of fat, protein and carbohydrates. The Harvard researchers found that as long as a diet reduced a participant's calorie intake, it resulted in weight loss.
Identifying Unhealthy Diets
Unhealthy dieting may ask you to limit or completely cut out an entire food or food group, such as carbohydrates or fats. Unhealthy dieting may also feature meal skipping or all-out fasting. The use of meal replacements or supplements, instead of real food, also often characterize unhealthy diets. Dieting that promises extraordinary weight-loss results, such as 20 lbs. in three weeks, or discourages exercise is also likely to be unhealthy.
Effects
If you make drastic, healthy changes, any diet may bring about significant weight loss in the first two to three weeks. Over time, however, you should level out to a weight loss of about 1 to 2 lbs. per week to be healthy. When you lose weight too quickly, you risk losing lean muscle mass instead of fat. Lean muscle mass keeps your body looking healthy and operating in a functional way. Lean body mass also burns more calories at rest, so when your diet causes you to lose it--you also experience a drop in your metabolic rate.
Failure
About 5 percent of dieters manage to keep their lost weight off. If you repeatedly follow unhealthy diets and lose and regain weight, you are likely to become frustrated and believe that weight loss is impossible. If you follow unhealthy diets that advocate quick weight loss, you are also continually losing muscle mass. Since it is much easier to gain fat, rather than muscle, when the scale goes back up you are likely fatter than when you started your diet.
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