Pros and Cons of Dieting

Dieting is a common way to lose weight, improve health, or stay fit. While some diets can affect change, they may also carry potential risk and consequences related to the decision to diet if not approached with care.

A better understanding of the pros and cons of dieting can help someone gauge an appropriate pathway to doing what’s right for their health and lifestyle.

Advantages of Dieting

1. Weight Maintenance
Dieting can be a helpful technique for losing or maintaining weight, especially when accompanied by an exercise regime. A structured meal plan combined with portion control will allow anyone to decrease caloric intake and hopefully develop better eating habits. Dieting may offer long-term sustainable results.

2. Better Health Markers
Many diets address higher cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels and improve overall health. A healthier diet has been shown to lower the risk of chronic illnesses such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers. Diets that incorporate whole foods and performance-based nutrition often lead to physical health changes.

3. Nutritional Awareness
Following a diet heightens awareness of food choices. People learn to read nutrition labels, portion sizes, and make healthier choices. Knowledge is often beneficial for some time after a strict diet is completed. Realizing how food impacts energy, digestion, mood, etc., is likely to help decision-making.

4. Energy/Mood Boost
Nutritious diets can bolster better energy and mood. Food sources abundant in vitamins, minerals, and other essential substances will contribute to brain functioning, cognitive clarity, and overall stabilization of one’s mood throughout the day. Reducing sugar and processed food, while increasing fruits, vegetables, and grains results in sustained energy.

5. Assists Fitness Goals
Active people, especially athletes, put specific food/diet/nutrition protocols into place to help them fuel exercise, recover from exercise, and build muscle. Planning out macronutrients, hydration, and timing of meals are essential aspects of working out effectively. In addition, eating the right foods before and after workouts can help performance and decrease the risk of injury.

6. Healthier Eating Patterns
Going on a diet can help people learn to avoid emotional eating, late-night snacking, and overeating. Setting up regular mealtime patterns with regular food composition helps encourage mindless eating and moderation. These patterns and behaviors can stick and can lead to improved eating patterns and habits that last in life.

7. Enhanced Self-Control
Going on a diet typically helps build self-control to make difficult decisions and to manipulate various behaviors in life. This ability to self-regulate and apply self-control can translate into other areas of life such as productivity, time management, and being responsible with money.

8. Long-Term Lifestyle Changes
While the word “diet” implies that it is just a temporary thing, it can be an initial start point in a sustainable lifestyle change. A diet or the things that you learn in a diet can give you the routine and behaviors that you may follow and continue to improve your life even after the initial change of weight.

Disadvantages to Dieting

1. Nutrient Deficiencies
Some diets don’t simply eliminate a food, they eliminate whole food groups and can lead to nutrient deficiencies throughout the body. For instance, if an individual follows a low-carb or very low-fat diet, they can decrease their consumption of fiber, vitamins, or healthy fats if they don’t pay attention. As time passes, deficiencies in fiber/vitamins will negatively influence immune functioning, bone health, physical vitality, etc.

2. Short-Term Results
Quick-fix or fad diets are typically characterized by short-term weight loss methods that aren’t realistic or sustainable as time passes. Once someone stops dieting, many individuals typically just regain the weight back and find themselves in a cycle of yo-yo dieting that is hard on the body. Forcing oneself to quickly gain weight back can impact the metabolism negatively, which can lead to feelings of diminished self-esteem.

3. Mental and Emotional Stresses
Different diets can cause stress, anxiety, or preoccupation with food. There are pressures to adhere to strict diets/rules or guilt if you slipped and made a mistake with food or illicit an action which reduces the enjoyment of eating. This may lead to pre-articular thought processes that can make habitual eating continuously mentally tiring and exhausting.

4. Social Situations
Eating healthy and dieting may negatively impact social situations of eating. Dining out or attending parties or family meals outside of the diet would cause anxiety to eat food as part of the eating socialization to fully eat food. Restrictions on your ideal weight or weight loss can create awkward interactions or tensions between those you are associating with.

5. May Slow Metabolism
Severe calorie restriction may cause the body to slow a person’s metabolism as means of conserving energy. When trying to lose weight or maintain weight, the body’s metabolism slowing can affect the body’s ability to continue losing weight or maintaining once the weight is lost. A body may also just hold on to its fat stores instead of burning them for energy, also called conservation mode.

6. Risk of Disordered Eating
In the extreme, forced dieting can lead to other behaviors or disordered eating affiliated with binge eating, orthorexia, or anorexia types of thought processes and behaviors. Dieting will require a person to monitor mental health and be vigilant and seek help when necessary. An individual can suffer much more psychologically from over-focusing on food and body image problems.

7. Can Be Expensive
Certain diets require specialty foods, supplements, or meal plan subscriptions that are expensive for some. There are entire foods, produce, or meal plans that are outside of the budget for many, useful, and effective. Making plans to eat out may become exhausting or lead to diet fatigue and abandonment altogether.

8. May Not Address Some Root Causes
Dieting may improve food intake, but it may not change, address, or do anything to address root causes associated with eating—affiliated with emotional eating, lack of sleep, or sedentary lifestyles. Dieting that does not address underlying or root causes may not sustain identifiable weight loss if the behaviors which caused weight gain are not changed.

Conclusion

Dieting may improve health, weight management, or diet management and allows an individual to be aware of making better food decisions. Dieting can also create a sense of self-discipline to try to stay in control of their eating.

Overall, aspects of dieting do have negative consequences associated with mental stress, social issues, or the ability to create sustainable habits and should not be ignored. The healthiest diet is not a diet as it pertains to food, but promotes health benefits and includes a variety of foods that fits a lifestyle.

Listen to your body and set realistic and healthy goals for yourself. Dieting should be part of a sustainability plan. It should not be necessary for dietitians or healthcare professionals to be part of diets. Balance, education, and moderation matter.