Why diets NEVER WORK!

A “diet” is any severe restriction of food or calories that’s temporary. Most conventional diet programs call for extremely low calories: 800-1200 or less for women and 1500-1800 or less for men.

Any time you restrict calories drastically like this, you will lose weight.

The major issues with this are:  

First, the weight loss from very low calorie dieting almost never lasts; over 90% of the people who lose weight on conventional diet programs can’t keep it off. The second problem is that most of the weight you lose from low calorie dieting is muscle, not fat.

Statistics prove that diets never work in the long term. If they did work, then how do you explain the huge obesity problem today? And why is it getting worse?

According to the National Institute of Health, there are over 100 million overweight people in the United States. That’s 55% of the adult population! Over 20% of U.S. adults are clinically obese, which means they are at risk for one or more of over 30 health problems that are associated with excess body fat.

Despite the fact that there are more diet programs and weight loss products

available than ever before, obesity has continued to rise. The Center for Disease Control recently announced that the number of people in the United States who are clinically obese (at least 30% over their ideal body weight) increased from one in eight in 1991 to nearly one in five in 1999.

There’s a valid scientific reason why most diets fail dismally. Most people make the classic mistake of trying to “starve” the fat with strict diets. However, because the human body has a complex and infallible series of defense mechanisms to protect you from starvation, it’s physiologically impossible to permanently lose fat with very low calorie diets. As soon as your body senses a food shortage, these defense mechanisms start to kick in. The human body is simply too “smart” for the restrictive very low calorie diet approach to ever work.

So with this information I want you to do some research on yourself.  Try to figure out if your body fuels itself from healthy fats or healthy carbs?  Figure out your BMR by doing the following:  (Pretty approximate)

Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 X wt in kg) + (5 X ht in cm) - (6.8 X age in years)

Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 X wt in kg) + (1.8 X ht in cm) - (4.7 X age in years)

Note: 1 inch = 2.54 centimeters

1 kilogram = 2.2 lbs.
From here calculate your calories lost through exercise and figure out howmany calories you need to be eating everyday to lose a pound a week.  3500 calories = one pound.

For example:  If you had a BMR of 1300 calories and you excercised 3 days a week at approximately 500 calories a workout, then you would have a loss of 1500 calories a week via excercise.  In order to lose one pound you need to be in a loss of 3500 calories, so you need another 2000 calorie deficit.  I would recommend adding in another day or two of excercise to create another 500-1000 calorie loss to total 2500 calorie deficit and then I would decrease calories from there.  So if my BMR was 1300 I would need to cut approx 145 calories a day to get that extra 1000 calorie loss a week to create one pound loss each week.