Diets don’t work! If eating less in general or cutting out certain foods groups worked,
we’d all be thin by now, right?
The key to losing weight isn’t dieting. Dieting slows your metabolism down. Boosting metabolism naturally is the key to permanent weight loss.
Low fat diets have been popular for about 15 years and yet sadly Americans on average are getting fatter with every passing year. Unfortunately this trend is “catching on” in other countries, too. Much of the “low fat” processed food you buy is loaded with extra sugar instead. Not a good trade off.
Low carb or high protein diets have been around for decades and have always been controversial. There is concern that it’s not a good idea to completely eliminate large groups of healthy foods such as fruit and whole grains. While they seem to work initially, you are mainly losing water. You aren’t getting thinner, you’re getting dehydrated. And what about counting calories? Besides being tedious, your body will adjust to a lower calorie intake and slow down your metabolism to match, so now you have to eat less and less. Clearly, neither low fat or low carb diets or counting calories is the answer to permanent weight loss. First of all who can live like this? No one I know!
Regardless of what diet you choose, when you eventually go off it and go back to a normal way of eating, you’ll almost always gain the weight right back. We’ve all been there, and it’s frustrating!
Your body has a complex system of hormones that regulates how it will store and burn the food you eat. Your body produces fat storing or fat burning hormones depending on the amount and type of food consumed. Here is a simple version of what happens: When you diet and your body senses there isn’t enough food, it produces “fat storing hormones” When you go on any food restriction diet, your body senses it’s in danger – that there isn’t enough food and your metabolism slows right down, going into “starvation mode”. This is why dieting can help you lose weight initially, but then you get stuck at a weight loss plateau. Your body does this by producing fat storing hormones. This makes your body burn fat more efficiently which makes it harder for you to lose weight.
Conversely, when your body senses there is plenty of food, it creates fat burning hormones and your body burns food more easily. If you know someone that seems to eat anything and not gain weight, that’s because their body is producing adequate fat burning hormones, keeping them in the fat burning zone around the clock.
Of course if you want to lose some weight fast, you can temporarily restrict your food intake enough that you can probably lose some weight before that vacation or swim suit season. But that doesn’t mean you will keep it off. In as little as two weeks of food restriction, your body has already started going into starvation mode where your body starts storing fat. Your body is doing what it is designed to do and has done since the dawn of time. To keep you going when there isn’t enough food. The mechanism that kept your ancestors alive during times when there wasn’t ample food is now making you fat.
