by Anna Jones, Chief Editor
If our bodies require to burn a certain number of calories to keep our body weight,
then it should be easy to lose weight, shouldn’t it?
Common sense tells us that all we have to do is cut down the number of calories that we
take in.
Unfortunately there are numerous studies that demonstrate that this does not work in the long-run. A
study published in the American Journal of Nutrition, for example, revealed that a group
of individuals on a low calorie diet, who lost an average of 26% of their body
weight during the course of the study, were not able to keep that weight off.
EVERYONE in the study regained almost 75 percent of their lost weight within three
years of finishing the study. And many studies show even worse results than that.
If weight loss were as simple as “consume no more than 1000 calories a day” or
“consume no more than 1500 calories a day” then everybody would be lean.
There are numerous reasons why a low calorie diet won’t lead to long term weight
loss.
Part of it has to do with biology and how our ancestors evolved to endure the feast and
famine lifestyle.
We need a certain amount of calories to stay alive. Since humans and other animals
evolved in the days when we had to hunt and collect our food, and food supplies were
never predictable, our bodies developed in such a way that permits us to survive times of
famine.
When little or no food is available, our metabolism simply slows down and we burn less
calories. Unfortunately this is just one of the many survival mechanisms that our bodies
developed that worked to keep us alive thousands of years ago, but that don’t work so
well in the modern world where there’s a MdDonald’s on every street corner.
Our natural inclinations to crave foods that are negative for us, like fat and sweets - foods
that would help us survive a famine thousands of years ago but now just pile on more
fat cells - don’t help much either.
A study in the Journal of American Medicine proved that a group of people put on a
very low calorie diet experienced a 20 percent reduction in their metabolism in the first
month and their metabolism continued to fall for three months straight after that.
What a nightmare! Going on a low calorie diet means that you have to eat less….and
less…and less…in order to lose weight, and you will very quickly reach a point where
you are struggling simply to keep your weight.
Every dieter out there who has ever scrambled to lose weight by drastically cutting
calories recognizes this is true.
The first few days or even the first week or two of the diet, the weight crashes off.
You’re perpetually starving and can’t focus because you’re so hungry and you’re
Cranky and dizzy, but hey, at least the weight is falling off, right?
But regrettably, that doesn’t last very long. The weight loss slows down, and then it
stops. No matter how much you starve yourself you’re seeing no progress.
That’s the other reason that low calorie diets fail - because most people can’t last very
long on a diet where they are constantly starving.
And if you start eating normally - if you even start increasing your calories a little bit…the
pounds come piling back on, undoing all of your hard work.
This sounds like awfully disheartening news, but it really doesn’t have to be. It simply
means that low calorie diets do not work well for maintaining weight loss.
In fact, it’s good news - it means that you never have to starve yourself again! Instead,
you need to choose a healthy diet that has been proven to work and that permits you to
eat a normal amount of food every day.
By the way, read this weight loss program consumer report to see why it’s my Top Pick.
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