Revealing Why Your Diet and losing Weight Formula Doesn’t Work!
Maintaining your ideal weight is one of the best wellness and anti-aging principles there are. The main reason for this is the health risks associated with being overweight, all of which threaten not only general health and well being, but lifespan as well. These health risks start appearing with as little as 3-5% over recommended body fat percentages.
And they are not minor – risks include heart disease, diabetes, kidney problems, osteoporosis, cancer and arthritis. Approximately 40% of heart disease in women is linked to the fact that they are overweight, and it is also connected to higher risks of breast cancer, osteoporosis and other complications, including diabetes, which has a strong link to obesity.
Research upon research has shown that dieting doesn’t work. The extensive range of diet books and the massive diet industry backs this up. Overweight people often go from one diet to another and end up in an endless cycle of yo-yo dieting, in a constant attempt to lose weight. And yet it just never seems to be permanent. Instead of dieting, an entire lifestyle change is needed. The principles outlined in this website are the only ones that will produce permanent weight loss and a long, healthy and disease-free life. This webpage will show you the important principles of both reaching and maintaining a healthy weight.
Two important things to remember from the beginning, however, are:
1. It will take time. Strange as it may sound, the slower you lose weight, the more likely you are to achieve permanent weight loss.
2. It will not be easy. You will need to change the way you eat, start exercising if you don’t already, but most importantly, the way you think about yourself and your body, must change. Goal-setting could well make the difference between success and failure in your weight loss attempts.
Low-calorie diets and why they don’t work
The most logical thing to think when trying to lose weight is to cut back on calories. There are several reasons why this doesn’t work and it usually leads to that dangerous syndrome called ‘yo-yo dieting’. Yo-yo dieting, or the process of losing weight on a diet only to regain it once you go off the diet, is not only detrimental to your overall health, but usually leads to even more weight gain once you start eating normally.
Here are 6 reasons why low-calorie diets don’t work:
1. They slow down your metabolic rate
Over thousands of years, humans have developed a mechanism for survival called the ‘starvation response’. The body recognizes when there is a food shortage (in this case, enforced!) and slows down your metabolic rate in order to protect you. It thinks that this is all the food it is going to get for a while, and adjusts the rate at which it burns calories so that you can survive for as long as possible on less food. Unfortunately, the body can’t tell the difference between dieting and starvation, so the response is the same when we go on diet. It sounds strange, but when you eat less, your body burns less. When you eat more, your body burns more! That is also why it is so difficult to lose those last few pounds or kilograms when the first few come off relatively easily.
2. You lose muscle
For most dieters, the most important thing in their mind is to lower the numbers on that scale as fast as possible. However, the goal in changing your body is loss of fat, not of lean muscle tissue. Loss of lean muscle must be avoided as much as possible! Once the starvation response is triggered, your body begins to look for ways of conserving energy. Muscle is metabolically active, and getting rid of it is your body’s way of decreasing energy expenditure. It is easy for your body to do this. The problem is that it will take this energy from everywhere – skeletal muscles, the heart muscle, even internal organs. Studies have shown that in very low calorie diets, even with exercise, 40-50% of the weight loss comes from lean tissue. In addition, low-calorie diets cause large losses in water weight. The rapid weight loss often experienced at the beginning of a diet is mostly loss of water. If weight loss is attempted too quickly and you are not prepared for this, it will be a real mental challenge to keep on the diet!
3. They cause a permanent change in your metabolism
This again relates back to the starvation response in our genetic makeup. When you drop calorie intake too low for an extended period of time, your body produces more fat-storing enzymes and less fat-burning ones. In other words, your body changes its chemistry to make it easier to store fat in the future. In addition, the thyroid gland (responsible for the rate at which you burn calories when at rest) reduces the amount of active thyroid hormone. This too slows down your metabolism, as you burn less energy when you are resting.
4. They cause rebound weight gain
Everyone initially loses weight on a low calorie diet, but it doesn’t take long for your body to switch into starvation response. Once you reach this stage it becomes more difficult to keep losing weight even though your calories are very low. This lack of ongoing results, plus gnawing hunger pangs and insatiable cravings, often causes people to give up out of sheer frustration. They go off the diet, the weight piles back on and they land up where they started – only with less muscle and a slower metabolism. With a slower metabolism, what they used to eat to maintain weight now causes weight gain – forcing people back into the yo-yo dieting cycle. All that happens is that you gradually get fatter and fatter while eating less and less!
5. They increase appetite and cravings
When your body goes into starvation response, it triggers appetite and cravings in an attempt to get you to eat more food. The hunger pangs can become so strong that you will do anything to get food – including raiding the fridge at midnight and scoffing piles of ice cream and donuts. This then creates an additional burden of guilt. It is virtually impossible to stay on a diet when all you can think about is food. Few people have enough sheer willpower to handle the food cravings (and then the guilt feelings caused when they break their diet).
6. They decrease your energy
Low-calorie diets leave you tired and lethargic, and unable to sustain high levels of activity or intense workouts. Intense aerobic and weight training is critical for long-term weight loss and this cannot be sustained when you are permanently tired from too little food.