For many people, the word “diet” seems synonymous to starvation. Dieting involves restricting calories; but it is very wrong to assume that you have to give up important meals to lose weight.
Weight loss doesn’t seem too difficult to understand. It’s a simple principle, right? Eat less, lose the pounds. Is it really?
No, it isn’t. Weight loss is more complex than you think. Your body’s primary function is always to survive. This primary function is what makes weight loss a lot trickier than you may expect.
Shouldn’t skipping a meal cause one to lose weight? In the short-term, yes of course, eating much less will cause weight loss. Skipping meals would drastically cut calorie intake and translate into pound loss. Going hungry this way will put your body in a fasting mode. In this state, the body loses fat as well as important lean muscle mass, causing you to lose weight very quickly.
The method, however, is very unhealthy and the body knows it. That is why crash diets cannot work for long-term weight loss. In fact, starving yourself for the short-term will cause you to gain back all or even more of those pounds you have lost quickly.
It is almost impossible to sustain an eating plan that calls for less than a thousand calories a day. Severe calorie restriction puts a considerable damper on energy, leaving one with problems of irritability, headaches and weakness.
Starving is counterproductive. When you start eating so much less, the body begins to sense it needs to take drastic measures to survive. It starts going into survival mode, a physical defense dating back to our primordial days. Early man’s meals were inconsistently available and one had to work hard to get them. Because of this uncertainty, the body had to make do with the oftentimes meager amount of calories it had in store until the next meal, which often took some time coming. It had to learn how to conserve energy and use as little as possible. To do this, the body had to slow down its metabolism or its capacity to burn fat for energy. This is what it does when it goes into starvation mode.
Metabolic slowdown is what happens when you crash diet. Despite restricting your calories, your body will respond by keeping your weight up as much as it can.
When your body starts reacting to the sudden calorie withdrawal with weight plateaus and downward energy spirals, you may inevitably give up and go back to your normal intake. Once again, your system gets confused and doesn’t know what to do with all the calories. But by Jove, with the state it’s in, your body is going to take what it can get. What you take in will be hoarded into fat and that’s how you will gain weight with a vengeance. Now you are back where you started or perhaps, miserably more worse off than you were.
The best way to diet is to eat sound, nutritious meals that set you off only 500 calories or less of your required calorie intake in a day. Do not go hungry or skip meals. Make most of your calorie deficits stem from vigorous exercise. Not only will exercise sculpt and tone your body but it will keep those unwanted pounds off for as long as you indulge in it.
There simply is no substitute for a good exercise and diet plan. It wouldn’t hurt to get a little help, too, from an over-the-counter supplement called Phentramin-D. Phentramin-D can help you get started on the right track. With a good diet, great exercise plan, and a potent diet pill, you just can’t go wrong.