Heres one that will make you rejoice and groan at the same time: Dieting is worse for you than being overweight. Thats right, the restrictive behavior of significantly reducing calories and eliminating entire categories of foods puts such a toll on a body, its better to simply be mildlyobese. But why? Its all due to weight-cycling, the well-established phenomenon that large shifts in eating habits lead to weight loss followed by even more weight gain. Studies show that along with excess pounds, a complex mess of changes to gut flora, metabolism, fats, and, yes, mental health all work together to make you fatter, unhealthier, and more miserable. So why should you quit your well-intentioned but altogether unhealthy diet plan? And what can you replace it with? Lets get into it.

Dieting Messes with Your Metabolism

Heres what happens when you follow a diet any diet that is restrictive compared to your everyday eating habits: Your basal metabolic rate, or the minimal amount of energy your body needs to perform simple functions at rest, drops. Put another way, when you drastically cut the number of calories you eat in a day, your body flips out and says, OK, Im going to drastically cut the number of calories I burn in a day, too. Its not doing this to spite you. Rather, it sees the massive drop in incoming energy and fears the worst: Theres a famine. Your body then launches starvation survival mode and refuses to burn any more calories than absolutely necessary, leaving you wondering why, on three slices of rye toast a day, youre still not losing weight. (The good news: You usually can reset your metabolism when you start eating like an adult again.)

Dieting Is a Nightmare for Your Gut Health

If youve ever had the experience of working hard to shed a few pounds, only to find yourself gaining back those pounds plus a few more the next time the holidays roll around, youre not alone. One of the insidious truths of weight cycling is that most people dont just lose X and gain X backthey gain X +Y back, too. A study in the journal Nature explains why: Every time you add or subtract pounds, a bunch of body-related variables change including blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and the bacteria in your gut, known as your microbiome. When you gain weight, you develop more of a certain type of gut bacteria that supports the weight gain. But heres where it gets tricky: When you lose weight, changes in your microbiome are slow to follow suit. So if you begin to regain the weight you lost before your gut bacteria catch up to where youre at in your yo-yo cycle, the weight-gain-promoting bacteria still in your gut accelerates the process of packing on pounds, causing you to put on even more than before.

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Dieting Develops the Wrong Kind of Fat

Not all fat is created equal. Sure, fat of any kind will give you hell when you try to squeeze into the dress pants you bought for your cousins wedding. But under the surface, theres subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. Its the latter, also referred to as deep belly fat, that begins to pile up in people who weight cycle and thats a problem because visceral fat tissue is metabolically active, meaning it plays a role in the production of hormones that contribute to heart disease, diabetes, and inflammation in your body. As your weight swings higher and lower, again and again, the amount of visceral fat continues to climb, putting you at risk for equal or greater health problems than you would face if you never lost the weight to begin with.

Dieting Is Horrible for Mental Health

Here you are trying to do the right thing for your health, and all youre managing is to make yourself feel worse. Yo-yo dieting has been linked with depression and low self-esteem as well as a decrease in the chemical production of serotonin, the neurotransmitter in your body responsible for the regulation of stuff like mood, sleep, and, the place the slippery slope begins, appetite. Depression causes its own negative feedback loop, as the worse you feel, the more food becomes a method for self-soothing, leading to weight gain, followed by more dieting, and greater depression. Theres also the less measurable but no less painful element of feeling like a failure: Regaining the weight youve worked so hard to lose makes you feel helpless and like you have no control.

So, screw dieting. When that term pertains to the restrictive behavior of significantly reducing calories and eliminating entire categories of foods in an effort to shed weight, one thing is clear: It doesnt work. But that doesnt mean you just throw in the towel. Instead and this is just as hard as dieting, but better for your mental and physical health you need to make small shifts in how you eat, exercise, and make healthy choices.

Practice Portion Control

So you know you dont want to have a wildly different or restrictive diet. But just because Atkins isnt going to work for you, doesnt mean you could do with eating a little less at every meal. Portion control is probably the number one way to lose a few pounds without messing up your body. Drop your portions by 10% each meal. It will add up and your basal metabolic rate wont know the different. So what does this look like?

Well, a serving of grilled chicken has 128 calories. A serving of steak has roughly 200. Hey, thats not so bad, youre thinking. Thats well within the 2000-calorie-a-day plan Im trying to follow. But when is the last time you ate a single serving of protein for dinner? For the record, thats 3 ounces of chicken or 3.5 ounces of red meat. What does that say there on your steakhouse menu? 16-ounce ribeye? Yeah. Take those 200 calories and multiply by 4.6, throw in a few hundred more for the sauce, and youll see the problem. Youve very nearly cleared your daily allotment with just one dinner entre (nevermind the sides).

You could, of course, order grilled fish instead. But we dont think so. When your belly is craving bloody red meat, give it the steak but give it a third as much as the menu offers. To make it easier on your judgment, ask your waiter to deliver said amount on your plate at the restaurant and doggy-bag the rest for later. If youre grilling at home, purchase smaller cuts or split the giant T-bone with your wife and kids, then load up the rest of your plate with lean greens.

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So youre a meat and potatoes person, aiming to become a gluten-free vegan in an effort to lose weight is like forcing yourself to do yoga when what you really love is football. It isnt going to work. Instead, eat your meat. And your potatoes. The secret is in how you prep them. Instead of going for the cheeseburger and fries, throw a slab of 90-percent lean meat on the grill and roast a few whole potatoes. Youll be delivering a ton more micronutrients to your body when you choose whole foods over processed while cutting your calorie consumption, ounce for ounce, in half.

Balance Your Plate

Growing up, you undoubtedly heard all about the food pyramid that wacky triangle thing with treats at the top and lettuce at the bottom. Thats still more or less the best way to think about the breakdown of your meals and overall daily food consumption. In practical terms, that means when you build your dinner plate, picture a clock face. 12 to 3 oclock should be your protein (chicken, fish, beans, or red meat); 3 to 6 oclock is your starch (rice, potatoes, pasta), the other halfor 6 to 12 oclockshould be veggies: Salad, steamed broccoli, green beans, roasted carrots, and so on. Laying out your meal this way saves you the trouble of counting every calorie, because its virtually impossible to overeat when the highest-cal foods are smallest servings on your plate.

Go for Strong

The numbers on the scale will tell you how much you weigh, but they will not tell you how big your biceps are, how strong your heart and lungs may be, or what percent of your body is made up of fat versus muscle. Quit fixating on some number you think it ideal for a guy your size, and start hitting the weights and pounding the pavement. On a vanity level, a fit body looks a hell of a lot better than a scrawny one. And on a life level, youll be buying yourself a few extra years you can use bonding with your family

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Dieting Will Kill You Faster Than Obesity. Heres What to Do Instead. - Fatherly