If you consider yourself overweight, you are certainly not alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the rate of U.S. adult obesity in 2017-2018 was 42.4% — an increase from 30.5% around the turn of the 21st century. And if you’re trying to reverse this course, you may have looked down at the numbers on the scale and been discouraged about your progress.
While there is often a correlation between your weight and the fat on your body, the goal for most people is really to lose the fat, not weight. They’re much more concerned about the way their clothes no longer fit or their appearance in a bathing suit than they are about what their BMI is or the number of pounds registering on the scale.
Why Dieting Doesn’t Always Work
Regardless of whether you’re concerned about your weight or your appearance, if you’re like most people, your first course of action was to start a diet. Dieting alone frequently fails. The CDC reported that between 2015 and 2018, 17.1% of adults over the age of 20 were on a diet on any given day. But 80% of people who lost a significant amount of body fat regained a portion of it within 12 months.
There are many reasons why diets fail to work in the long term, if they work at all. Here are some of the more prevalent reasons why people regain their body fat after dieting.
Genetics
Some people are genetically disadvantaged when it comes to fat accumulation and build. Your parents and grandparents can be excellent indicators when it comes to determining how you will carry your own weight. If your parents or grandparents have difficulty with lower belly fat, you could have a genetic disposition that causes you to gain fat in the same area.
Gender
While men and women are both vulnerable to obesity and excess fat storage, the way each gender carries their fat is different. Women tend to accumulate fat around the hips and thighs, and male fat is often concentrated around the midsection. That also means as you lose weight, the fat deposits around these areas tend to be the most stubborn.
Age
As we get older, our metabolisms slow down, which means that we burn fewer calories. If you don’t decrease your intake or counter your intake some other way, such as exercise, it will become easier to gain weight and harder to lose it as you get older. For this reason, your “diet” may just be the reduced amount of calories that you need to consume to sustain your weight.
Sustainability
To maintain a diet, it has to be sustainable. If you can’t stick to a low-calorie diet because it allows too little sustenance or the food is unappealing, you’re liable to give it up pretty quickly.
Lifestyle
Leading a sedentary lifestyle will make any plan to lose weight more difficult. If you don’t exercise or do very little exercise, your body will burn fewer calories. While it’s true that you can’t outrun a poor diet, you also can’t out-diet a sedentary lifestyle.
Aftercare
What happens when you hit your goal weight? If you return to your pre-diet nutritional habits, you’re probably going to start gaining weight and accumulating fat. The best diets educate you as to how to maintain your weight after you reach your goal weight and dimensions.
What Fast Weight Loss Diets Do People Try?
A simple Google search will give you access to limitless diets, and some of them will actually work if you stick to them. Most of them involve a reduction in calories or carbohydrates with the overall objective of dropping your daily intake below the amount you burn, so your body has to start relying on fat reserves to meet your daily energy requirements. Some reapportion the types of foods that you eat to trigger an increase in your metabolism.
What they don’t address is that stored fat can be very stubborn to lose. You may, in fact, decrease your muscle instead of the fat that you want to get rid of. Here are some weight-loss diets that people try with varying results:
Diets With Fleeting Results
Liquid Diets – These diets involve replacing solid foods with liquids, like shakes. It’s fine to replace a meal with a smoothie, and that can help with dieting, but these diets often involve dangerously low-calorie intakes. You probably will lose weight on a liquid diet, but weight regain is common.
Eating Only Type of One Food – There are diets that involve only eating hardboiled eggs, lettuce, grilled chicken, etc. Again, these diets may bring down your daily calorie count enough to lose weight, but they often deprive you of nutrients that you require. Like liquid diets, the results of one-food diets tend to be short-lived.
Diets That Are Difficult to Maintain
Paleo Diet – This diet promotes foods that were available to our ancient ancestors. Nuts, raw fruits and vegetables, lean meats, and fish are allowed. All processed fruits and many other common food items aren’t permitted. When done correctly, this can be a healthy diet, but it’s often difficult to maintain this diet in the modern world. Consequently, this diet can be very difficult to maintain. When you go off of it, you may rapidly regain the fatty weight.
Raw Food Diet – This diet is exactly what it sounds like. Everything you eat is raw and must be vegetarian (not necessarily vegan). You can eat as much as you want within reason, which ensures you get plenty of vegetables and fiber, but there are nutritional gaps in the diet, and it can be difficult to maintain.
What Is a Fad Diet?
The term “fad diet” just means that the diet became popular in a short amount of time. It doesn’t necessarily mean the diet is bad. On the contrary, one of the reasons that new diets become fad diets is because people are getting results with them. The problem with trying new “fad” diets is that there hasn’t been enough time to determine the long-term effects.
Some diets fail to provide the participants with sufficient nutritious information, deliver mixed results, or fail to keep the fat off. Still, just because a diet is considered a fad diet doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not going to work or that it’s a bad idea healthwise. You just may want to ask your healthcare provider what they know about the newest diet before you plunge in.
Fat Reduction vs. Weight Loss
As was previously mentioned, when people say, “I want to lose weight,” what they usually mean is “I want to reduce my body fat.” There are other ways than dieting to lose body fat. The medical industry has developed numerous surgical procedures to attack the problem of obesity. These invasive procedures involve specific risks and lengthy recovery times.
There is, however, a medical procedure that is effective, painless, and involves no recovery time. Erchonia helped pioneer the field of laser lipolysis, commonly referred to as “laser lipo,” and the Emerald Laser system delivers affirmative fat reduction results without surgery.
How Laser Lipo Works
Laser lipolysis works differently than surgical procedures. A laser beam focused on a particular area of the skin will penetrate through the epidermis to adipose (fat) cells. The laser bores a hole in the fat cell membrane, which serves as a drainage pore for the lipids inside. The laser also emulsifies or melts the fats and promotes drainage. When the lipids leak out, the body’s lymphatic system disposes of them.
Some laser fat removal systems also kill the fat cells. This might sound like a permanent solution to fat reduction, but it’s actually fairly dangerous. If you should regain weight, your fat will be apportioned to different areas of the body — sometimes around vital organs. Emerald Laser by Erchonia does not kill fat cells. Instead, fats drain from the cells but leave the adipose cells alive. If you have a weight gain in the future, the fat would be naturally distributed.
The Emerald Laser system uses ten 532 nanometer lasers to target specific areas of the body. It is the only laser lipo section market approved by the FDA for patients with BMIs over 30. It has also been proven effective in multiple blind studies.
How Laser Lipo Can Help Your Achieve Your Body Goals
Laser lipo can target specific areas. So, if you have excess fat on your lower abdomen, back, neck, arms, legs, buttocks, hips, etc., laser lipo can help you target these problem areas and achieve the results you want. Many dieters are disappointed to find that when they achieve their ultimate goal weight, they don’t look the way they did before they gained the weight. That’s because few people lose fat evenly. If you have achieved your goal weight through diet and see that your stomach is still protruding or your hips are still wider than you’d like, Emerald Laser can help you minimize those problem areas.
Laser Lipo Combined with a Calorie-Neutral Diet
Emerald Laser can help you achieve the results you’re looking for, but it’s important that you maintain your weight to maximize your results. The best way to achieve this is by adopting a calorie-neutral diet. In other words, you only take in the calories that you use. This will prevent you from reaccumulating fat.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you’ve tried the best diets for weight loss but are still unhappy with the contours of your body, you may be an excellent candidate for laser lipo. Here are some of the most common questions Emerald Laser providers hear from potential clients.
How Often Can I Get Laser Lipo?
Because the Emerald Laser system is painless and there is no recovery time, you can receive treatments a few days apart, but we recommend waiting a week or two for treatments in the same area. That’s because laser lipo is a gradual process, and it enables our providers to measure your progress.
How Soon Can I Expect Results?
Most clients begin seeing results within two weeks. By the end of 12 weeks, you should see significant changes.
Is Laser Lipo Dangerous?
In general, laser lipolysis is much safer than surgical options, but the Emerald Laser system is completely safe. Most people feel nothing at all. Those who do, feel only a slight tingling.
How Much Does Laser Lipo Cost?
Depending on your location, packages cost from $1,500 to $2,500 for six treatments.
If you are tired of the limited success offered by fast weight loss diets, contact an Emerald Laser provider near you to schedule an initial consultation.
Tags: Fad Diets, Weight Loss