Do slimming diets work?

To diet means to restrict yourself to small amounts of special kinds of food for a particular purpose, i.e. reduce cholesterol or, the most common, to lose weight. When I talk about slimming diets I am specifically concentrating on the latter, weight loss. The diets may have other benefits, better skin tone, lower cholesterol, etc., but it is weight loss that this website is particularly concerned with.

There are many types of diets and it seems that a new one is coming out every week. Atkins, South Beach, GI, are just a few that have hit the headlines in recent years and have celebrities endorsing them.

But how do they work.

As mentioned in the Exercise Guide section of this website, there is only one sure fire way to lose weight, use more calories than you consume. Exercising is one way to do this, dieting is another.

Its purpose is to restrict the amount of calories you consume every day. To lose one pound of body fat per week you need to use up 500 calories more than you eat each day. That may sound like a lot but to put it in perspective 500 calories = 100g of Dairy Milk, Maltesers, Kit Kat or Snickers.

Different diets restrict your calorie intake in different ways. For example some might restrict the amount of carbohydrates you consume, some the amount of fat, whilst others will limit the amount of calories overall.

Do slimming diets work?

You will often here nutritionists and other health care professionals saying that diets don’t work. They are often talking about fad diets that you can’t stick to long term. Once you stop the diet the pounds pile back on.

But burning more calories than you consume is the only way to lose weight and to keep it off is to burn off the amount you consume.

So many people return to bad eating and exercising habits after having success on the scales and are then surprised when the scales start to creep up again. Read the following articles to find out which slimming diets are fads and which are likely to work long term. Also read about other e-slimmers’ success stories.