A couple of weeks ago, I had an intense discussion about health and diet centers with two of my coworkers. Both of them are both struggling to find the best diet program out there in order to lose weight.
Their approach to diet and health were wrong, as both of them were influenced by the endless marketing campaigns of diet centers and clinics promising the “fastest weight loss programs in the galaxy.”
Their mistake is simple; dieting in a healthy fashion is not a temporary endeavor that ends after your subscription to a diet center is over; healthy diet is more of a lifestyle.
And since we are talking about lifestyles, we have to admit that we have a lot of practices in our culture, in our day-to-day lives that defies the very concepts of healthy dieting. Before going any further, I just have to say that I am neither a doctor nor a nutritionist, and what I am about to say in the coming few lines is a reminder to myself the same way it is a reminder to you all.
First and foremost, gone are the days when an entire family used to wake up together at the break of dawn to share a breakfast table. I am not sure our grandparents were familiar with the nutritional concepts of today that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but they used to stick to a healthy and heavy breakfast.
Nowadays, we have fallen into the trap of modern lifestyle. We wake up late, we run through our morning chores in order to make it on time for schools and jobs; having a nice meal to prepare for the long day ahead is the last think we worry about.
We usually don’t even care about lunch and dinner. If we somehow survive falling victims to junk foods, we won’t survive foods loaded with fats and carbohydrates.
The formula of healthy lifestyle is simple, what goes inside your body, reflects on how it functions. Food is meant to give your body the needed input of information and materials for it to function and maintain itself properly, give it the wrong input, and it would make you suffer.
“Nutrients are the nourishing substances in food that are essential for the growth, development and maintenance of body functions… When nutrient intake does not regularly meet the nutritional needs dictated by the cell activity, the metabolic processes slow down or even stop,” said Carolyn Denton in an article published on the University of Minnesota website.
Knowing these basic facts about nutrition and health, we should not be surprised by the spread of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and heart diseases in the Kingdom. All of these diseases can be traced to our dietary habits. Many researchers now believe that these diseases are partly related to the food we consume. “While they used to believe diseases such as Type II diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stroke and certain cancers were caused by a single gene mutation, they are now generally attributing these conditions to a network of biological dysfunction. And the food we eat is an important factor in that dysfunction, in part because our diets lack the necessary balance of nutrients,” as mentioned in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 2004.
The good sign is that Saudis, particularly the young ones, are more exposed to the concept of how food and sports affect their health. That is why, there is a growing industry of health, diet and fitness centers in the market. It is a good sign as long as such approach to health is turned into a lifestyle instead of a hyped marketing stunt.
You could follow one of those flashy diet programs for months and lose a load of kilos, but once your subscription is over, you would end up gaining all those lost kilos and more in mere weeks.
