Supplements and Weight Loss Dieting
Here’s a very sobering thought.
In the USA alone, each and every year, over US$40 billion is spent on things that people really don’t need to spend one single brass penny on!
These are things that are supposed to help the people who buy them, to ‘cure’, them of some kind of affliction, but don't.
These dollars don't get spent on necessary household items and they are not donated to worthy causes
This money is spent, or some would perhaps say wasted, on diet products.
And, basically, the reason that this money does not need to be spent, or why some folks might suggest that it is money wasted, is that there really is no great secret or any magic formula to losing weight.
If you consume less calories than you actually need to use to get you through the day, and do that every day, you will lose weight.
If you continue to take on board the same amount of calories, but exercise more so that you are burning off more energy than you are consuming, then again, you will lose weight.
And that is it.
There really is nothing more to it than that, and yet the good people of the USA spend over $40 billion every year, trying to lose weight!
Now, this is not a weight loss manual or a ‘how to diet successfully’ guidebook, so I do not plan to go into why this should be in any great depth, except in so far as it relates to our dietary supplement topic.
And where I would suggest that it does have a bearing on our subject matter can be discovered if you try to make sense of why so much money is spent on something that you could essentially do at home, for nothing.
That is, I believe that people are willing to spend so much money on this diet plan or that weight loss program because they believe that each one is a magic bullet that will enable them to lose weight without making any effort or commitment.
In other words, by buying the XYZ diet, these folks want somebody else to do their hard work for them!
Now, this is extremely relevant to this book, because making sure that your nutritional intake is both correctly balanced and adequate is also something that no-one else can do for you.
Only you can be responsible for your life style and the diet that you consume, and that becomes a particularly important factor once you decide that, yes, by hook or by crook, you are going to lose weight.
Let us look at a couple of potential dieting scenarios, as a way of illustrating this point.
Option one is that you have sufficient spare cash to be able to buy the latest ‘can’t fail’ diet plan to hit the market.
Let’s call is the ‘You Can’t Bend It’ diet plan or the YCBI for short.
As part of the overall ‘YCBI’ diet regime that you have chosen to subject yourself to, you will have to reduce your calorie intake in some way, which will also mean your food intake.
And, of equally little doubt is the fact that the ‘YCBI’ diet ‘handbook’ will tell you that the diet plan that you are following is ‘a perfectly balanced nutritional diet’.
The ‘YCBI’ diet will undoubtedly contain absolutely every one of the vitamins, minerals and nutrients that you will ever need. Everything will be included in the powders and shakes that they have sold you, according to the manufacturers spiel.
Sorry, but in almost every case, it is palpable nonsense!
At the last count, there were over 1000 different over the counter dietary supplements available in the USA and Canada.
The companies behind them are not selling you a diet plan with nutrients thrown is as an after thought.
The whole reason for their existence is to produce the ‘perfect’ balanced multi-nutrient dietary supplement.
And yet, at the same time, every one of these companies (all of whom would appear to be experts in their field) disagrees with one another as to what is the most perfectly balanced nutrient ‘formula’.
So, every one of these companies does their own thing, and produces something entirely different from what their competitors make.
Does it therefore seem logical or likely that a company whose reason for existence is to sell weight loss products is going to create a better balanced multi-nutrient supplement than the hundreds of businesses who specialize in the supplement business?
I don’t know about you, but it seems extremely unlikely to me.
So, when you read that any weight loss program contains a ‘perfect balance of nutrients’ or some such description, take it with a very large pinch of salt indeed.
Unless they are the luckiest company in the world, it is simply not true.
Nor is the situation going to be a great deal better if you are dieting on a do-it-yourself basis, that is, you are simply reducing your calorie intake and not taking any fancy diet pills to help you shed the excess ‘you’.
I’m sorry to be the bringer of bad tidings but, if anything, you are in an even worse situation (except that you have kept more money in your pocket, of course)
Go back a little. We have already clearly established that the diet of the average citizen of most Western countries is calorie rich, but nutrient poor.
That fact notwithstanding, and however accidentally it mighty happen, with all of those calories that are the cornerstone of the average Western diet do come some nutrients and some latent goodness.
So, if you remove all of those calories, then you automatically remove almost all of the very small amounts of nutrients that were previously being taken.
You have gone from taking in lots of calories and precious few nutrients to far less calories and no nutrients at all, in the most simplistic terms.
The bottom line is therefore that, no matter how you are trying to lose weight, it is more critical than ever it was before to make sure that you are supplementing the small amounts of food that you eat with good doses of supplementary nutrients.
Now, as you will read later, it is (just about) possible to overdose on nutritional supplements, and, yes, you already know that, in the seven years between 1987 and 1994, five people actually died from overdosing on supplements.
But, that is less than one a year from the whole population of the USA, which I think makes it fairly unlikely that you will overdose.
When you are trying to lose weight, more than at any other time of your life, it is absolutely critical that you are supplementing your diet with additional vitamins, minerals and trace elements, simply because that is the time when your body will need them most.
So, if money is an issue for you, or times are fairly hard, here is a tip for you that you would do well to pay heed to.
You don’t need the fancy, trendy diet potions and pills to lose weight.
Just cut down on the calories that you take on board, get some more exercise and spend the money that you saved on the best balanced diet supplements that you can find.