You know what doesn’t make sense? There are so many weight-loss products out there yet the obesity epidemic grows every year! Why are so many women continuing to have a problem with the ‘battle of the bulge’? The answer is dieting. Diets don’t work and there’s a sneaky little reason behind it. The best way to lose weight and keep it off is by following a healthy eating guide and getting to know the benefits of whole food.

Why Diets Don’t Work

There’s a very good reason diets don’t work. Think about it this way. If you were a company that sells a product that customers were supposed to use once but never buy again, wouldn’t you eventually run out of customers? Yes! The diet industry isn’t really interested in keeping you trim and healthy. They just want to make money!

Pre-packed diet meal plans are the worst offenders. Yes, they do help you take off some weight but they do it by starving you! Calorie-deprivation diets are the oldest trick in the book. They put you on a 1,000 calorie a day meal plan with frozen, chemical-laden food that barely fills your gut and the weight drops off.

Now you’re thinner but you’re also anxious, irritable, and hungry all the time. During this process, your body goes into ‘starvation mode’ and begins storing all the fat it can find. As soon as you go off the diet, you binge on the fat your body has been craving for 6 weeks and you blow up like a hot air balloon!

And if you’re not into the diet meal plans, maybe you like the pills. Stimulants and fat blockers are the most common type of diet pills on the market. The stimulants make you lose weight by keeping your mouth so dry you can’t actually swallow food and the fat blockers suck all the nutrition away before your body gets a chance to absorb it. Either way, it’s just another way of starving yourself thin.

How Processed Food Keeps You Fat

Another thing I don’t understand about diet food is how it can legally be called “diet food” in the first place. Most specialty diet foods on the market today are loaded with chemicals, preservatives, and synthetic sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup that encourage your body to pack on the pounds.

Processed foods such as cookies, snack cakes, French fries, microwaveable meals, donuts, candy, and soda are all designed to fool your body into thinking its eating something nutritious. The bright-colored food may taste good and fill your stomach but it doesn’t hold any nutritional value. So even if you’re eating it by the handful, you’re still always going to be hungry!

What is Whole Food?

Whole food is food that has been unaltered by man. Whole foods are the fruit that grows on trees or the cows that graze openly in a field. Minimally-processed foods such as organic yogurt, butter, and cheese can also fall into the “whole-food diet” category. Food that has been completely unchanged would be classified as “raw food”.

The best way to lose weight and stay healthy and full of energy is to eat as much whole food as possible. This means dining on organic vegetables and fruit, lean meat, poultry, and wild-caught fish, nuts, seeds, legumes, and healthy dairy products.

Your body craves lots of nutrient-rich foods to give it the fuel it needs to function at its best. When it comes to following a healthy eating guide, it’s important to remember healthy fat should have a place in your diet. This means adding coconut oil, olive oil, avocado, and walnuts to your weight-loss program so you’re less tempted to binge on empty-calorie snacks such as cake and cookies.

Adapting the whole-food lifestyle can be tricky at first, especially if you’ve never done it and have just always lumped anything edible into the category of “food”. The best way to adjust to this lifestyle is to dive right in. Throw out all of your ‘diet’ foods and other junk food, get rid of your soda, and go to the grocery store with a list. Fill your cart with produce, organic nut butters, hummus, organic meat, wild-caught fish, seeds, nuts, whole grains, and organic dairy products.

You do not have to be a gourmet chef to prepare a whole food diet for yourself and your family. Fish is a quick, easy food. Salads are perfect for lunch or dinner and carrot sticks and protein-rich hummus make the perfect diet-friendly snack. Stop trying to find the perfect pre-packaged meal or diet pill. The secret to real weight loss doesn’t come in box, shake or pill form. It comes from nature. Once you feed your body the nutrients it’s been craving and give it the exercise it needs, you’ll shed pounds in no time without feeling deprived!