The unhealthiness of our society’s general obsession with weight takes both the literal and figurative forms. In the literal form, what we search in relation to health and fitness, including weight, tells a story of just how harmful our general view on issues of weight may be to our bodies.
Leading the way in the UK’s most popular fitness questions typed as search queries into Google’s search engine is “how to lose weight fast,” a search phrase which reached 40,500 average monthly searches and 486,000 per year. Despite pretty much all of us having knowledge of the fact that quick fixes either don’t work or are just a temporary, unhealthy “solution,” the desire to lose weight fast remains something which too many people are fixated with. It’s an unhealthy obsession, often fuelled by the unrealistic images of what different forms of media portray as the “ideal body.”
The second most searched fitness-related phrase comes in quite far behind what is clearly an unhealthy view on fitness, with “Best way to lose weight” averaging 14,800 monthly searches and 177,600 per year. The difference in numbers between this particular search and the one leading the way is quite big, but it’s still rather encouraging to know that quite a lot of people entertain the best way to lose weight over the fastest way to lose weight, because the best way to lose weight isn’t the fastest way of doing it and certainly not the healthiest. There’s a whole lot more to losing weight and keeping it off than going on fad diets and taking dodgy weight loss pills which are often an intricate part of the typical results one would get if they typed in “how to lose weight fast” into a search engine.
The truth about weight is that we’ve largely been programmed to aspire to a weight which is unrealistic and unhealthy. That’s why people who manage to lose weight quickly often struggle to keep off the weight they lost, simply because they’re going about it the wrong way.
Yes, being overweight or even obese has some detrimental effects to one’s health and perhaps even their self-esteem, and it really doesn’t hurt to want to be toned, slim (to a certain extent), lean and healthy. What does hurt however is being unhealthily skinny or worse yet, taking your body through a rollercoaster ride of having to adjust to the negative effects of harmful diet pills, crash diets and everything else which comes with trying to lose weight too quickly or trying to maintain an unhealthy weight.
If your approach to weight loss has you running searches which contribute to the 2,900 monthly average for “best foods for weight loss,” you’re looking in the right place, but that is only the beginning. Weight loss shakes may come up as a good option for healthy meal replacements which give you all the nutrients you need while filling the void of a heavier meal, but this too is only part of the bigger picture.
To lose weight healthily and keep it off, the steps you take to maintain your ideal weight should become entrenched into your lifestyle, so you should be able to keep eating the right food, exercising and supplementing where the need arises.