Don’t lose weight if you are already skinny!

Speaking of clinical health studies, one came out this week that I thought I would mention. If you are already lean, don’t lose weight. Don’t diet just to pursue some Instagram ideal with your body.

Why? There are three reasons. First, as we have discussed here many times, dieting reduces muscle mass, and muscle mass burns calories. If you are losing muscle, you are losing your ability to burn calories down the road. In other words, the weight will come back even faster if you stop dieting.

Second, it is important to understand that your body adjusts to a lower calorie count when you are dieting. Specifically, it tends to slow down the metabolism. While not necessarily permanent, that slower metabolism may not speed up down the road when you stop dieting, leading to fewer calories being burned, and thus, faster weight gain.

And last, the study found a slight increase in diabetes risk for those that diet while already lean.

There was another interesting but predictable takeaway from the study. Those that diet with exercise and healthy eating have a better chance of keeping weight off than those that use other methods such as diet pills and fad diets. That is why you do not hear us talking much about diet products that we sell. Those products can be helpful but should be only one piece of the solution. Exercise and diet are far more important.

Dieting should not be extreme. Don’t take shortcuts. Just make healthy eating and exercise part of your life and you should be just fine. We really did not need another study to tell us that 🙂