When Is a Diet Not a Diet

A Calorie Controlled Diet will lead to Weight Gain not Weight Loss!
Hard to understand as it may seem but by cutting your calories down to near starvation levels you will ultimately end up gaining weight. Anyone currently depriving themselves may well want to call me out & yes i am sure you have lost weight, however have you given any thought to what will happen when you return to your normal eating habits? You may well have been the same weight for years & decided to go on a quick diet to get into an old dress or those cherished skinny jeans, what you may not know though is that simply by eating the same foods you did before your diet you will now gain weight! To understand this you need to consider what your body does when you go on a restrictive diet.

• Your Insulin levels will drop causing you to feel hungry
• In the first few days it will use stored fat to provide the energy you need & you will lose weight
• Your metabolism will slow down to conserve energy
• You will start to feel the effects as tiredness, lethargy.
• Hormone changes can affect your mental state making you irritable & depressed.
• Your weight loss will stop (plateau) as your body tries to store fat rather than burn it to provide energy.

OK so now your body & mind are now in starvation mode, you are constantly hungry, most likely depressed & your motivation is destroyed when the scale doesn't go down any more. If you don't quit your body will turn on itself & start to use muscle tissue as energy instead of fat which it continues to store fearing starvation. Finally you throw in the towel & quit the diet, however the body you started with is not the same as the one you have now.

• Your metabolism is artificially low
• You are craving food more than ever
• Your body is in fat storing mode

So you not only start to eat more calories than you did prior to your diet your body metabolizes it slower & turns more of it into fat. You will ultimately reverse all the good work & end up with a higher body fat percentage than you had before. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as, see-saw or yo-yo dieting, however there is another way to diet that avoids these issues.