Why 95% of all diets fail

Date:   1/16/2009 2:19:36 AM ( 15 y ago)

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.  There are two major problems with this approach: First, the weight loss from very low calorie dieting almost never lasts; 95% 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. 

There is 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 is physiologically impossible to permanently lose fat with very low calorie diets.  As soon as the human body senses a food shortage, these defense mechanisms start to kick in. 

Fat loss is not as simple as calories in versus calories out.  There are 3500 calories in a pound of stored body fat, so cutting out 1000 calories a day should in theory produce a weight loss of two pounds a week.  If there existed an airtight mathematical relationship between caloric intake and weight loss, cutting caloric intake from 3000 to 1000 would result in a 60,000 calorie per year deficit, and would result in a 200-pound weight loss after a year.  What if the person began the diet weighing 200-pounds.  Would he or she disappear?

Over thousands of years, humans have developed a weight-regulating mechanism that recognizes when there's a food shortage and decreases energy expenditure to protect you.  This survival mechanism is known as the "survival response."  When the body senses calorie deprivation it says to itself, "It looks like this is all the food we're getting for a while, so we'd better stop burning so many calories and start saving our energy.  This way we'll be able to survive longer on the little amount of food we have."   The point here is that this same life preserving mechanism can work against you when you're trying to lose weight because your body can't tell the difference between dieting and starvation.

Without going into detail, here are seven reasons why you should stay away from very low calorie diets:

1. Very low calorie diets slow down your metabolic rate
2. Very low calorie diets make you lose muscle
3. Very low calorie diets increase activity of fat-storing enzymes and decrease the activity of fat burning enzymes
4. Very low calorie diets decrease the output of thyriod hormone
5. Very low calorie dieting increases the chance of rebound weight gain
6. Very low calorie diets increase appetite and cravings
7. Very low calorie diets decrease your energy and work capacity

With that said, here are eight powerful strategies to stay out of the starvation mode and lose fat permanently without dieting or deprivation:

1. Adopt the "habit" mindset instead of the "diet" mindset (good habits vs. bad habits)
2. Keep your muscle at all costs
3. Use a small calorie deficit
4. Use exercise to burn the fat rather than diets to starve the fat
5. Determine your minimal calorie requirements and never drop below them
6. Eat more frequently and never skip meals
7. Don't stay in a negative calorie balance long
8. Make your goal to lose weight slowly, be patient

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