There is plenty of medical evidence to prove that dieting actually can make you fat. And that happens because your body goes to war with any weight loss diet. They aren't natural and the body craves only a natural state of being. So as you struggle to find a weight loss diet that works, your body makes it tougher and tougher for that unnatural state to persist, which results in the negative effects of yo yo dieting: weight gain.
In this article, we examine the physical reasons why your body sabotages your efforts to diet. We'll also look at ways to overcome them so your weight loss diet has a better chance of working.
Defense Mechanisms Overview
Our bodies have defense mechanisms that evolved in us throughout history. In early times, food shortages required the body to accumulate fat stores to protect against the lean times. And to this day,our bodies are still programmed this way, even though it's no longer needed.
So when we go on a diet, the body thinks hard times are here so it goes into fat-storage mode to protect us. The more dieting you do, the more your body thinks it has to store fat. Your task,if you want to lose weight, is to outsmart the following defense mechanisms.
Metabolism
We often use the word metabolism - "I have a slow metabolism", "I have a fast metabolism." But what does it really mean in terms of a weight loss diet?
Metabolism refers to all the processes occurring in the body that are responsible for life: your heartbeat, your body temperature, breathing, and the burning of calories to create energy. Your metabolism determines how many calories your body burns to do its job. That's how your metabolism can be influenced by any weight loss diet that restricts calories.
Repeated diets cause your body to slow down its metabolism in order to become more efficient and continue running on fewer calories.But when you end your diet and return to a normal caloric intake, your body isn't used to burning all those calories, so it stores the leftover ones as fat. So to prevent that, you now have to eat much less than before just to maintain your new weight. In other words: your diet can never end in order to be successful. And a diet without end is a dire prospect for most of us.
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