Yo-Yo Dieting is the repeated loss and regaining of body weight. This type of dieting is very common and most of us follow it knowingly and unknowingly. It’s a process that causes the weight to go up and down like a yo-yo.
As dieters don’t treat dieting as a lifestyle change they’ll get on a diet for a while, shed a good amount of weight, and then regain it all later. They look at it as a short-term routine which results in gaining the weight back after impulsive weight loss.
The yo-yo effect is usually caused by drastically lowering your daily caloric intake by weight loss plans that involve missing meals, fasting, and crash diets. When you deprive your body of the energy it requires, this results in slowing down your metabolism process where the body burns the food you eat in order to produce energy. Slowing down of this process leads to weight gain.
Gaining and losing weight can have some bad health effects—here’s what you should know-
- Repeated weight loss and gain leads to complicated weight reduction and causes a negative impact on your metabolism, health, and body.
- When you follow a diet to lose weight it causes the body to increase appetite, when people use a short-term diet to lose weight, they end up gain back more weight than they lost.
- According to Diabetes Care research, which found that the frequency of yo-yo-dieting cycles was a significant predictor of diabetes risk, regular changes in body weight due to dieting is a risk factor for diabetes.
- When weight is repeatedly lost and gained, it increases the risk of heart disease. The greater the change in weight, the greater the risk. Fluctuations in body weight lead to heart-related conditions from high blood pressure to stroke to heart attack.
- As Obesity is a risk factor for developing a fatty liver, yo-yo dieting episodes, where weight is lost and then regained increases the risk of chronic liver failure.
- The rapid ups and down in body weight also leads to drooping of muscles too. Changing your diet pattern will lead to a reduction of well-built muscles.
What should you do?
- Work on changing your lifestyle, commit to bring lifelong changes in your eating, and physical activity behaviors.
- Adopt healthy eating habits. Eating small frequent meals every 3 hours will boost your metabolism and with regular physical activity manage weight and promote health for life.
- Weight loss is not magic and therefore one should work on changing his/her lifestyle, and let physical activity be part of your daily life. Take small steps.
Yo-yo dieting is changing your eating and lifestyle for a short period of time which leads to only short-term benefits. To break this vicious cycle follow a long-term balanced diet, do not skip meals, avoid junk foods, and eat food that is rich in nutrients and fiber.