Is Your Diet Aging You Prematurely?


by Janice Wee - Date: 2008-07-12 - Word Count: 446 Share This!

Don't you long for the slimmer body of your youth?
With time, your metabolic rate goes down and if you aren't careful, you'll gain weight.

Your body does not burn fat as efficiently as it did in when you were young, and insidiously, the fat creeps in as the years go by.

Year by year, you gain a pound or two and before you know it, the pounds pile up and you are seriously overweight.

So you diet to lose weight. Your starve yourself and see gratifying results. Your weight goes down quickly, until you reach a plateau. Then it gets harder or even impossible to lose any more weight. You deny yourself your favourite foods and eat the bare minimum to stay alive, yet the scales refuse to budge. You give up and eat normally, like everyone else and balloon out, gaining back the weight you lost, with interest.

What's going on?

When you starve yourself to slim down, you don't just lose fat. You lose muscle. As your muscle decreases, your metabolic rate plummets and you burn less calories for any activity you might engage in. On top of that, when your body goes into starvation mode, it panicks and conserves as much food as possible in its fat stores to survive this and future famines. When you eat normally, your body hoards all the fat it can, using energy as efficiently as possible, burning as little calories as possible in case of a future famine.

Instead of a leaner, younger looking body, you get a flabbier, less healthy one.

On top of that, all the weight loss and weight gain within such a short period of time would damage your skin's underlying structure, leading to premature wrinkles.

That's not all, if you cut down all oils, your hair and skin will suffer. Your skin needs oil to stay supple and retain moisture. Without these oils, you age prematurely. You need to consume some healthy oils for your body to look its best.

Vegetable oils and nuts are a rich source of vitamin E, an antioxidant which neutralize free radicals that would otherwise age you prematurely. Free radicals are produced natually in your body and also occur in your environment. These wreak havoc with your cells and the damage the bring would cause you to age faster than you should. If you cut those out of your diet because of the high caloric content of the oils and nuts, you reduce your skin's defense against free radicals.

Basically, if you intend to lose weight, avoid crash diets and stick to a healthy diet with plenty of exercise to maintain your much needed muscle tone.

Related Tags: health, diets, anti-aging, beauty, antiaging, aging, premature aging

More antiaging tips at www.getyouthful.com

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