Why low calorie is not enough

If our bodies need to burn a certain number of calories to maintain our body weight, then it should be easy to lose weight, shouldn’t it?

Common sense would say that all we have to do is slash the number of calories that we consume.

Unfortunately there are a lot of studies that show that this does not work long term. A study published in the American Journal of Nutrition, for instance, showed that a group of individuals on a low calorie diet, who lost an average of 26 percent 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 completing 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 skinny.

There are a number of 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 survive 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 gather our food, and food supplies were never predictable, our bodies developed in a way that allows 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 Dunkin Donuts on every corner.
Our natural tendencies to crave foods that are bad 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 showed that a group of people put on a very low calorie diet experienced a 20 percent decline 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 maintain your weight.

Every dieter out there who has ever struggled to lose weight by drastically cutting calories knows this is true.

The first few days or even the first week or two of the diet, the weight crashes off. You’re constantly starving and can’t concentrate because you’re so hungry and you’re irritable and dizzy, but hey, at least the weight is falling away, right?

But unfortunately, 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 reward.
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 terribly discouraging news, but it really doesn’t need 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 select a healthy diet that has been proven to work and that allows you to eat a normal amount of food every day.

Help other people discover this post

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.