Low Calorie Diets - Why They Never Work

Common sense says that all we have to do to lose weight is burn off more calories than we take in. Of course, as we all know, losing weight is never this easy. In fact, there are a number of studies that prove this weight loss method doesn't work when it comes to keeping the weight off. According to a study done by the American Journal of Nutrition at least seventy percent of the people who lost weight during a previous study regained all of their weight back within three years!

There are a lot of reasons why maintaining a low calorie diet doesn't work for long term weight management. Some of these reasons are biological and are the result of human evolution. Humans need to take in a certain number of calories to stay alive. A long time ago, when food supplies weren't regulated or predictable, the human body learned how to survive in times of food shortages and famine. When not enough calories are consumed, the body slows down its metabolism. Of course, this slower metabolism doesn't exactly work as well in a world of readily available junk food.

The natural human instinct dictates that, when we are hungry, we will crave foods that are high in calories-foods like junk food. These foods would have done quite a bit to keep us alive a long time ago, when we got plenty of exercise every day because of our living conditions. Now we are more sedentary and these cravings aren't doing us any good. The Journal of American medicine proved that people who are put on severely restricted caloric intake diets showed a twenty percent decline in their metabolic rates within a month. The participants' metabolisms kept slowing down the longer they stayed on the diet.

This is not ideal at all. When you restrict your calories you force yourself to eat less and less, all in the name of losing weight. It won't take long before you are struggling to maintain your weight. Ask any dieter who has resorted to severe caloric restrictions!

The reason the lower calorie diets don't work is this: when you first start the diet, your weight will feel like it is almost falling off. Of course, you'll constantly feel like you're starving and you won't be able to concentrate and you'll feel irritated and dizzy for a lot of the time. Unfortunately, the rapid weight loss doesn't last long. It slows down and eventually it stops happening entirely. This is because your body's metabolism slows down enough to make the most of your low calorie diet.

The other reason the extra low calories fail is because it is very hard to stick to a diet when you constantly feel like you are starving and when you eat even a few calories more than you've forced yourself to get used to, the weight starts coming back and quickly undoes all of your work.