Nearly everyone is looking to lose weight nowadays. And it’s no surprise since our serving sizes are getting bigger and bigger, our food is getting more fattening and sodium and sugar laden, and we are just becoming a society of gluttonous, unhealthy eaters. We love our food and our food loves us; it loves to make us fat. Some of us have tried to lose weight by eating low carb diet meals. In fact, low carb diet meals are becoming so popular that nearly every restaurant has low carb diet menus, you’ll see foods marketed as low carb in the grocery store and there countless books, magazines and internet pages devoted to this low carb fad. Does it work? Yes and no.
The Word Diet
When you use the word diet, you really set yourself up for failure. Sure, eating low carb diet meals will help you lose weight. Your body uses carbohydrates for energy but if you don’t exercise or you eat too many carbs and they’re not burned off, all those extra carbs are going to be transported into your fat stores. Is this your body’s way of getting back at you? No, it’s actually a very efficient way for your body to work. Your body stores that fat so that, in case you happen to starve later, it will use that fat as energy. So, eating a low carb diet meal will cause your body to burn fat for energy instead of carbohydrates. However, when you use the low carb diet meal as a diet, or a temporary situation, you will only find temporary results.
You’re Goal
For example, let’s say you’ve been eating low carb diet meals, you’ve been using the low carb diet menus in restaurants, you’ve been buying all the foods marketed as low carb and you’ve seen results. You can finally fit into that pair of jeans you used to wear in high school, or you can finally fit back into your wedding dress, or tux; or whatever other goal you’ve set for yourself. Then, you go back to your old eating habits and you gain the weight right back. Some people even gain more weight than they had to begin with. Why did this happen? Because you used your low carb diet meals as a temporary fix and you didn’t make it a lifestyle change, which is how permanent weight loss is achieved.
Lifestyle Change
That’s not to say that you have to eat low carb for the rest of your life, for every meal. You just need to make good food choices, you need to burn more calories than you take in and you should use your low carb diet meals as a way to achieve permanent results by making it a lifestyle change. Losing weight can be done; you just have to make a conscious effort to change what and how you eat.