Reducing Calories Does Not Promote Weight Loss
Reducing calories will not help you lose weight. Calories are not the enemy here. If you eat 2500 calories per day and reduce yourself to 1500 calories per day, you won’t necessarily lose weight. Your body will simply burn fewer calories. You will reach a dieting plateau. This means that you may lose a few pounds; however, once you reach a certain point, it will be impossible to lose weight.
Let’s begin with, how a person typically goes on a diet. One day you look into the mirror and see tight fitting close and you just don’t look right. Your neck, arms, legs, and waist are larger than you remember. You put on a pair of jeans and they just don’t pull on the way the use to, easily. They fit tight and are uncomfortable sitting down. Sound familiar? Anyways, on this day, you get angry and frustrated enough to finally put your self on a diet and decide to lose weight. And this time, you are going to stick to it.
Today is the day of new beginnings. You start by skipping breakfast and decide that you will have an early lunch, or brunch as they call it. Kill two birds with one stone. When it gets close to your next meal, all you can think about is food. You begin to get a little shaky as your body is not used to going this long without food.
You feel miserable, but you bravely tell yourself that you can do this. You don’t want to quit, and you want to actually lose weight this time. You still have enough motivation that at lunch you decide to have something small as you are still convinced that eating less is the key to losing weight.
By dinner time you have a headache and chances are you are hungry. Do you really want to go through this every day? But today, you are still motivated enough to say yes. You stick with this diet for the remainder of the evening.
If you’re brave then you may have held off for a week or two, chances are, you’ve gone back to your ways after only a few days. Usually diets link this end in some kind of binge which officially declares the end. Even if you were able to stick to it for a few weeks, you won’t have lost any significant weight. You may have even made it worse. Since your body thinks it was starving, it begins to absorb every calorie that enters it.
You may have lost a few pounds during this type of diet, but the weight that was lost is just water weight, not real fat loss. And all that water weight will be gained right back when you eat normal again.
This is why if you keep trying to starve yourself, you will never lose weight. Starving yourself is not the answer. If you are serious about weight loss, you need to start giving your body the right types of calories in the right doses on the right days.