Celebrity diets can damage your health

And this, of course, is true. Spend a few minutes on the internet searching for people's experiences with dieting or 'detox' regimes and you will easily find that most people do not lose weight or feel better by dieting. Most overweight people find themselves very hungry or in other ways feeling unwell when they are dieting and most of them decide to give up the diet - only to be seduced at a later date by the extravagant promises of a 'new' diet, and to find again that they are unable to stick to the diet because it is too restrictive or they are too hungry and feel too ill. I firmly believe that diets make you tired, cold and hungry, but they do not make you slim.

Dr Traci Mann two years ago published the findings of the biggest study ever into the effects of dieting and found definitively that diets damage your health and that most people end up heavier than before. In my innocence I thought that that would sound the death knell on the promoting of diets, but sadly it hasn't.

One problem with diets is that you are expected to eat fewer calories than your body needs. That's a no-brainer, in my opinion. If your body needs more calories and you are not supplying them, then that has got to be harmful.

Another big problem is that so many diets limit the choice and range of foods that you eat, and as most dietitians will tell you, for optimum health our bodies need a variety of foods. So dieters can easily develop nutritional deficiencies, and believe me they can be far more serious and harmful than carrying some excess pounds.

The easiest, safest, simplest, healthiest way for overweight people to lose weight is to cut down on salt and salty foods. Try not to sprinkle salt onto your meals, and try to cut down on processed foods/ready meals/takeaways because it is estimated that these account for about 75% of salt/sodium intake. Cutting down on sodium brings a multitude of health benefits - lowers high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels, reduces your risk of developing heart disease, stroke, most cancers and type 2 diabetes, lessens the pain of osteoarthritis, etc. If you eat plenty of fruit and (unsalted) vegetables, this will help you to lose weight even faster, because the potassium in fruit and vegetables helps to displace sodium from the body, along with the water that accompanies it.

You wonder why avoiding salt and salty food lowers weight like magic? It's because fat people are sodium-sensitive, and for them eating sodium-rich food (salty food) gives them a bad problem of fluid retention. This in turn depletes the body of calcium, and when you are short of calcium you tend to develop fat retention too. When your body has sufficient calcium it excretes excess fat in the faeces. It can't do this if it is short of calcium and so the excess fat remains in the body. See (2)

So there you have it: you can easily, safely and rapidly lose excess weight by limiting your salt intake. You do not need to limit your food intake, i.e. you do not need to diet.

Margaret Wilde www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/fatretention.html