Find out what your body knows that you don\’t. If you have tried several times to lose weight, and it doesn\’t seem to work as well as before, you might be in for a surprise.
This is going to come as a surprise, but you have a built-in system that is going to prevent your diet from working. It\’s like when a bear stores up fat for the winter, his body stores stops burning that fat at the normal rate. The bear\’s metabolism (not the bear himself) says,\”Hey, remember the last time when the food stopped coming for a couple months? It looks like that\’s going to happen again. If there is going to be a food shortage for the next couple months, I won\’t burn the calories.\” The bear has a built-in system for not losing weight based on the food supply called the hibernation mode.
You have the same thing.
This is natural in your own body, just like the bear\’s, as a heartbeat. You can\’t dictate to it any more than you can make your heart change its rhythm. Here is you experience: When you go on a diet for the very first time, your body doesn\’t realize that this will only be temporary, so it just keeps on burning the calories at the normal rate leading to your desired weight loss. You take off the pounds and everything is terrific. That happens the first time.
Here you can see that as you lose all the weight you wanted to, and are very happy with the results, your body is asking what had happened to the food supply. It make the decision that \”When the food comes back I\’m going to have to store up, so I\’m ready if this happens again.\”
Now you are happy because you lost the weight. So happy, in fact, that once you have gotten to your weight loss goal, you\’re right back to the same eating and exercise habits that led you to the diet in the first place. But, your body is making plans to keep store extra weight in case it runs out of food again.
After a while you realize you put all the weight back on. You go right back to that great diet that helped you lose all that weight, but something different happens this time: the weight doesn\’t come off the same way.
Why? Your body has activated its hibernation mode. Your body recognizes that the food supply has just shut down so it takes an animal instinct function of \”winterizing\” the metabolism. When there\’s no food coming in it must be hibernation time! I won\’t burn the calories.
That is not a choice that you consciously make, it\’s an involuntary animal reaction. Your body\’s physiology accepts the food cutoff and responds to it. Because of this, the diet takes longer and longer to work, but eventually you get back to your goal weight, and go off the diet and your old ways. You start piling on the pounds faster now, because your body, again, is making a survival decision: fatten up, because there will be more of these winter periods, and they may get a lot longer. Now you begin the well known \”yo-yo\” pattern: put a little on and fight to get it off, then put more on, then take that off, and over and over and over.
There you have the whole problem. When you go on a diet with the intention of it being a simple and easy fix for your weight situation, be aware that part of your brain is not going to co-operate and won\’t let you lose weight time after time on the same plan.
Weight loss is truly not about a short term change in your food intake. Weight loss is about long term change in your self-destructive patterns (bad habits). If you eat too much for your body to burn, you will get fat. 3500 calories is a pound. You can\’t change that. If you eat that much in one day, you have to burn that much to stay even. If you only burn 2500 calories but take in 3500, that extra 1000 calories a day will be an extra pound of weight in three and a half days. However, if your body sees the food supply shutting down it will tell your metabolism to burn calories more slowly, so you may only use 1500 calories the next day instead of 2500. Instead of losing weight, because your body doesn\’t want to let you starve, you may go on a diet and gain weight.
The only way you can control your weight is to study your habits that are leading to weight gain and change them. Those are food intake, diet, and exercise. That means real exercise, not like when you go to the gym and work out, and then stop on the way home for an ice cream. Your mind is thinking about losing weight, but your body is telling you that you deserve the ice cream for having worked out, but actually is tricking you into adding more calories so it can keep itself going.
Before you start your diet, you should read this. Why diet plans don\’t always work You might have a problem with your diet.Why diet plans don\’t always work will give you the straight answer.