Weight loss: Unhealthy facts you may not know about fasting, keto

Diet culture is usually clouded by a set of myths about food, and dieting focuses on thinness or weight loss and labels food as good and or bad.

This is where dietary therapy methods including intermittent fasting where food is avoided and ketogenic diets where the focus is on high fat and protein and less carbohydrates come in.

Globally, this is gradually becoming a popular means of weight loss in place of exercising and other healthier eating practices.

How does this affect your body?

Nutritional Anthropologist and health content innovator, Sasha Aparicio said that these methods of dieting though may provide short-term weight loss results, are usually not sustainable.

According to her, despite results including smaller weight numbers determined by the weighing scale as a result of these methods, the long-term effects on the body may be dire.

The body might end up relying on muscle mass to survive because it is being starved and the consequences of this, she noted, may be dangerous.

“When we talk about these popular diets like Keto and fasting. Popular diets could be short-term. The issue with these is that though it may show you effects in the short-term, the weight loss is not necessarily acquainted with health so they may see a smaller number on the scale but they may also have reduced in muscle mass and muscle mass is really important for our health. And when you are starving yourself, your body may start eating at that muscle mass. So yes, you may have a smaller number on the scale but are you healthier? What you should ask is, is it sustainable for years? Is it something that you can sustain for a long period of time?” she said in an interview with GSW’s Wonder Hagan.

Healthy eating

The nutritionist further recommended healthy eating patterns as suggested by researchers as the best alternative to achieving healthy weight loss.

“There are a lot of things we need to analyse. What is it about society that we acquaint beauty and health with body size when it is not necessarily the same and why are we prioritizing these diets that have a lot of products behind them, somebody is benefitting from them, benefitting from selling them to you ultimately, why are we prioritizing these over what we know in the huge body of research of what healthy eating patterns can look across cultures.

According to Sasha, the weight of a person does not determine their health and the Body Mass Index which is usually calculated based on the height and weight of people is toxic information to rely on to determine health and decide on dieting methods like fasting and keto.

“Diet culture is very wrongly rooted. Diet culture is a culture where we prefer smaller bodies over larger bodies, equate weight with health, body size with health and it's definitely not that clear cut but again it's influenced by a lot of the dieting industry in the West which has over time prioritized weight. BMI is outdated and should not be used to identify or correlate to an individual’s health. We have the measures to determine other much more important measures of health. BMI is very misleading and now even in the US they have pushed a lot of these BMI standards internationally, recognizing that when we are talking about clinical applications, they are not relevant,” she added.

Watch the interview below