Low Calorie Diets Don't Work

One of the most common approaches to losing weight is cutting calories. Low calorie diets are recommended by doctors, trainers and "beauty" magazines with calorie counting charts and even diets consisting of as little as a thousand calories.

By now we should have learned that low calories diets don't work. It is basically slow starvation. Most people can't stay on them very long and are miserable when they are on them. As soon as you come off of a low calorie diet, your weigh yo-yo's back up, sometimes higher than before. That's why its been referred to as yo-yo dieting.

Our bodies are amazing at adapting to our circumstances for survival. If you restrict needed calories, our bodies assume we are starving. This can even happen by consistently going 6 hours or more during the day without eating. Two primary things happen to adapt to this self induced starvation. The thyroid lowers the metabolism to a level to accommodate the lower calorie intake. This not only diminishes the effect of lower calories but also sets up the body to gain more weight when a normal amount of calories is consumed. A low calorie diet also puts stress on the body, causing it the adrenal glands to release stress hormones like cortisol. Cortisol tells the body to hold on to fat stores to make it through a time of starvation. It also causes sugar to be released, often from breaking down muscle tissue, which is converted to fat when not burned up and stored in the abdomen.

The ideal diet or food plan would be to eat four to six times a day, just enough to get you to the next meal or snack and avoid being very hungry. Eliminating sugar and starch will keep insulin levels low, and allow the body to continue to burn fat. Fat has no effect on insulin, so even though it has more calories per gram than protein or carbs, it will not cause you to store fat. Overeating at any one meal will cause insulin spikes, even eating too much protein at one time, and is far more important to avoid than too many calories over the course of the day.