Using Meal Replacing Food Packs Is Nothing But Planned Starvation!
The weight loss industry is a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. Naturally slimming treatments of every conceivable kind are available in the market, most of them no more than a figment of the imagination of fertile minds looking to exploit the gullible and ignorant people, desperate to lose weight, to make millions!
One such prominent kind of bogus treatment is to sell overweight people so called nutritional food packs or liquids, sometimes accompanying some magic pills that are said to raise your metabolic rate in some mysterious way unknown to science and help you burn more calories to slim down effortlessly!
The most famous herbal product amongst these has been found to contain heavy metal contamination, toxic compounds, psychotropic substances and pathogenic bacterial contamination and has been associated with acute liver failure, liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, renal failure and death.
The growth of these products and expansion of its nutrition clubs in major cities that promise fake health benefits portend a serious public health concern.
These so called nutritional products are manufactured and chain-marketed by huge multinational companies and employ freelance people who look to make easy money by pushing these products to anyone they know or meet.
These people know nothing about nutrition or health, so probably many of them don’t even understand the gravity of the danger they pose to the health of their victims! And they loftily label themselves as ‘Nutrition Centre’ and ‘Wellness Centre’!
The multi nationality of these companies is good enough to convince many people that the treatment must be good! This is anything but true!
These so called nutritional products are expected to provide you with the same nutrition that your meals provide but carry much fewer calories. You are told to replace one or more meals with this pack till you lose weight.
This pack swells up in your stomach when ingested and you feel full. It takes care of your hunger at this meal time.
What it doesn’t take care of, irrespective of claims to the contrary is the nutrition provided to you by your normal meal! If it did, it would provide you with the same number of calories as your normal meal, which would defeat the very purpose of replacing a meal with a low calorie substitute.
Your normal meal will provide you with certain grams of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, along with vitamin and minerals. Each gram of carbohydrates and proteins provides you with four calories while fats provide nine calories.
If your food pack were to contain the same number of grams of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, it would have the same number of calories. It can’t have fewer calories and still provide the same nutrition.
If it did provide the same number of calories, it wouldn’t precipitate weight loss. If it provided fewer calories, it wouldn’t have the same nutrition!
But people on these so called nutritional food packs do lose weight for a while because replacing meals with these packs amounts to planned starvation! It takes no brains to understand that starvation will precipitate weight loss, even if temporary, but it will also invariably destroy your health, often permanently!
Starvation sends your body into ‘survival mode’ and lowers your metabolic rate, meaning your body burns fewer calories every day than it did earlier. Naturally, as soon as you stop these bogus food packs, as you must sooner or later, and start eating normal food, your weight shoots up quickly, higher than it was earlier.
Apart from this, what you lose on starvation based diets includes glycogen (a kind of carbohydrate stored in your liver and muscles and used as the immediate source of energy during initial activity), water and proteins and not just fat. So you don’t actually slim down as much as the scale shows. The body quickly regains glycogen, water, and proteins when you stop starving and regains weight even before it restores all the lost fat and then some more!
The damage goes much beyond this. You develop various deficiencies of vital nutrients. You feel weak, tired and become anaemic, pale and haggard, with wrinkled skin and hair loss. Most people, who persist with this dangerous treatment, develop hyperacidity, colitis, malabsorption syndrome, severe electrolyte imbalance, hypertension and sometimes fatal complications. Many people land up in hospitals on such treatments.
Audaciously, these people even sale their products to diabetics, who would be at great risk on such products.
Apart from the dangerous side effects, you can’t take these expensive powders or liquids and miss one or more meals every day for a lifetime. Once you stop, you become more obese!
You must understand that there are no magic treatments for losing weight!
Only a healthy lifestyle, excellent nutrition consisting of our normal food, sufficient exercises even as simple as walking, adequate rest and mental peace and happiness can give you superb slimming and optimum health!
Read the articles ‘Basics Of Nutrition‘, ‘Simple Steps To Slimming‘ and ‘Dangers of Unscientific Treatments‘ on this website for more information.
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