Why Diets Don’t Work

For most people, their first experience with losing weight probably involved doing some kind of crazy crash diet which promised instant results in a couple of weeks. Billions of dollars are made by people who write books on these stupid diets that should never be allowed to be published. Nobody stops to think about why there are so many diets popping up all the time and why people go from diet to diet with no success. Some people end up caught in a never ending cycle of these fad diets and usually end up out of pocket, out of shape and back to where they started if they are lucky. A diet is simply an extreme restriction of calories over a short period of time. It is important to understand that no one can realistically go on a diet indefinitely. All diets will work in the short term in the respect that you will lose weight quickly but the problem is weight loss and fat loss are not the same thing. Most people who lose weight quickly actually burn off more muscle than fat which can be a recipe for disaster as I will explain shortly. Whilst it is true that you do need to burn off more calories than you need to lose weight, the calorie deficit should be very mild and weight loss should be a slow process.

Almost everyone, and by that I mean more than nine out of ten people, who go on an extreme diet like this will fail and end up either back to where they started or more likely actually end up in a worse position. There are more diet and weight loss programs out there than ever before but the reason we see so many new fad diets and crazy slimming supplements is that they just don’t work. People get stuck in a never ending cycle of these diets and eventually even someone with the strongest will in the world will give up. It is not the person that is necessarily to blame but their approach to dieting which is completely wrong. Extreme calorie deficit diets simply don’t work and there is an amazing body of evidence to back this up. Despite this being common knowledge for most fitness professionals and doctors for a very long time, the average person does not understand this.

Where problems begin

Most people think that because if you eat more calories than you burn off you will gain weight if you simply eat fewer calories than you need you will lose weight. While this is partly true it is not an accurate assessment of how weight loss works and the process of fat loss is much more complex than that. If we lost weight in a direct relationship to how many calories we ate then weight loss would be amazingly easy, we would not need any crazy diets and we would see an end to the obesity crisis altogether.

The starvation mechanism

The human body is smart and it has evolved over thousands of years to protect itself at all costs in the face of perceived danger. Without a mechanism in place to protect the body during long periods without eating, the human race would have died out a long time ago. If your body thinks that it is being deprived of food then rather than continue burning calories it shuts down and stores as much fat as possible to keep itself alive. This starvation mechanism actually kicks in much faster than most people realize. All kinds of hormonal changes occur in our body in the face of starvation which serves to slow down your metabolism so that you burn off as little energy as possible. This age old mechanism is responsible for keeping our ancestors alive during times where they were unable to find food and it is your body’s way of surviving in the face of starvation. You can often find people who eat next to nothing but are still unable to lose weight and it is partly because their body has shut down and actually stops burning off calories to survive.

The problem with extreme diets is that your body does not know the difference between starvation and an dieting so once you start drastically slashing your calories your body responds by shutting down and holding on to it’s fat stores at all costs. Once the starvation response starts kicking in your will find it next to impossible to lose fat.

Here are just some of the reasons why you can’t starve yourself if you expect to keep your weight off in the long term.

1 Metabolism

Your metabolic rate, crudely speaking, dictates how much energy your body burns off during a day. Someone with a fast metabolic rate will use more energy even when resting than someone with a slower metabolic rate. The more you try and starve yourself, the more your body’s metabolic rate will slow meaning you will find it next to impossible to lose weight. This is why it gets harder and harder to lose weight the longer you stay on a diet. Your body is slowing down and you are using up much less energy. The simple rule is that the less you eat the more your metabolism slows down and the more you eat the faster your metabolism will go. As you try and restrict your calories, your body responds by slowing down the amount of energy it burns which means you reach a point where cutting calories no longer has any effect on your rate of fat loss.

2 Muscle

Remember what we said about metabolic rate being responsible for how much energy you burn? Well the amount of muscle you have affects your metabolic rate. The more muscle you have, the faster your metabolic rate will be. Whilst most people see that they lose weight on the scales, only a very small percentage of the weight you lose actually comes in the form of fat loss when you severely restrict your calories. Most of the weight you end up losing on a starvation diet consists of water and muscle tissue which are things that you want to hold on to rather than lose.

If you end up getting rid of your muscle tissue, you will end up with a higher fat to muscle ratio which means you will be in a dangerous position and your metabolic rate will be drastically reduced. Obviously this is the worst case situation for someone who wants to lose fat in the long term. The more muscle tissue you lose, the more likely you will end up fat and with a sluggish metabolism.

3 Hormones

Hormones play a very powerful role in regulating our bodies and when you go on a severe calorie restricted diet you negatively affect your fat loss hormones which means it becomes much easier for you to store fat and put on weight. Your level of thyroid hormone (T3) for example will decrease during a period of severe calorie restriction which then negatively affects your metabolic rate.

So there you have it. Some important reasons why drastically reducing your calories may actually do you more harm than good.