Why isn't my diet working?
Anyone who has ever undergone an intensive pre contest or even just a rapid weight loss diet knows the meaning of hunger. But why is it that when we diet, do we not only get hungrier, but even if we stop dieting and we eat more food, the hunger gets worse and we end up over shooting our pre-diet weight?
When we undergo severe calorie restrictions, our bodies with respond with a symphony of metabolic changes to stop the weight loss. Our bodies see this assault as an attempt at starvation. So when we limit our calories in an effort to lose weight, we immediately begin to under changes chemically, and hormonally to fight our efforts. The lower you go with the calories, the harder your body will fight you to sustain your body fat levels and maintain a certain amount of weight for survival.
How much weight? Everyone has a body state of energy homeostasis. When we are in that homeostasis, our body will regulate things to not go above or below that point. Everyone has their own point, which explains why some people are skinny and some are overweight. As soon as you drop calories to a state of calorie deficit for that energy set point, your body will respond by sending out signals to not only stop weight loss, but also increase the chemicals and hormones responsible for weight gain. Your body will try to regain that homeostasis because of the energy gap you have created.
As your body fat cells decrease in size, your body will lower leptin levels which will tell you that you are hungry. The smaller the fat cell size, the lower the leptin, and the higher the ghrelin. As this is happening, your body will become much for efficient at energy production. Your normal satiety signals, or your feeling of being full after eating are greatly reduced even though you have eaten enough food to feed Africa. You have a reduction in thyroid hormone response, and your energy expenditure at every level goes down. Your exercise induced level of thermogenesis goes down, as well as your non exercise induced thermogenesis. For example, when you eat food, your body will burn way less energy eating and digesting that food than it would if the metabolic adaptations hadn't taken place. Fat oxidation goes down, expression of genes to store body fat go up. All of these things happen to make you perfect at storing fat. Even your digestive system gets better to the point where your lower intestine bacteria change to absorb more energy from the food you eat.
So as you can see your body does everything it can to set you up for massive fat regain once you resume eating your "normal" calories. So how do we fight this?
You need to raise your calories in a controlled manner to reverse these adaptations and let your body readjust to the increase in energy intake. If you don't, you will end up right where you began, now feeling even hungrier, with lower energy.
Be responsible and pay your body back when the time comes.
Mitch Robinson at http://www.championofmind.ca is a author, fitness and leadership consultant, and professional speaker with a range or private or corporate services available. Look for workshops or webinars near you!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mitch_Robinson
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