Why over 90% of the usual diets fail when you are trying to slim down?

Cutting calories backfires you. The more you cut, the more your body clings onto its fat stores as decreased calories produces the starvation response, where the body tries to “survive” and hold onto its calorie reservoir known as fat.

Diets sparsely Work

Most conventional diet programs call for extremely low calories. Any time you restrict calories dramatically, you will lose weight. So if your only criteria for success is losing weight, and you don’t care where the weight comes off from, or how long it stays off, in that sense you could say that “all diets work.”

There are two big problems with this approach. Firstly, the weight loss from very low calorie dieting almost never lasts. About 90% of the people who lose weight with diet programs can’t keep it off. The other problem is that most of the weight you lose with extremely low calorie diets is muscles, not fat. If you want to permanently lose fat without losing muscle (like you should), then it would be more appropriate to say “diets

never work.”

Research proves that diets never work in the long term. If they would work, how can you explain the obesity problem in the western world today? And why it is getting worse and worse day by day? 

According to statistics, almost 69% of the adults are overweight in the United States. And Over 37% are clinically obese, which means that they are at risk for one or more of over 25 health problems that are associated with excess body fat.

Despite the fact that there are more diet programs and weight loss products available than ever before, obesity has continued to rise. There’s a scientific reason why most diets fail. Many people make the 

mistake of trying to starve the fat with extreme diets. However, because your body has a complex defense mechanism to protect you from starvation, it’s nearly impossible to permanently lose fat with very low calorie diets. 

As soon as your body notices there's a food shortage, these defense 

mechanisms start to work. Your body is simply too smart for the very low 

calorie diet approach to ever work.

Why Eating Less Doesn’t Always Work

When you eat more calories than you burn, your body will store the excess as body fat. If you eat less calories than you burn, you will lose fat. Simple mathematics, ain't it? Unfortunately, not quite. If fat loss 

would be as simple as calories in versus calories out, then how could you explain why some obese people eat less than fit people, yet they still can’t lose any weight/fat? And how would it be possible for someone with a 2300-calorie maintenance level to eat only about 1000 calories a day, and they won't be losing any weight?

Using the mathematical approach, if you cut out 1000 calories per day from your maintenance level, that will add up to a 7000 calorie deficit in one week. There are about 7000 calories in 1 kilo of body fat, so in theory, cutting out those 1000 calories a day should produce a weight loss of 1 kilo per week. In reality fat loss rarely works out with such mathematical manner.

When a you start to cut calories, weight loss generally occurs rapidly. But it never takes long before weight loss slows down, and then eventually comes to a complete stop. Why, you might ask? How come is it that you don’t lose 25 kilos in 25 weeks or 50 kilos in 50 weeks with a 1000-calorie deficit?

The explanation is actually quite simple: 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 “starvation response.”

The Starvation response

You may have heard probably stories about people getting lost in the mountains or at sea for months with no food at all (only water), or being confined in a prisoner of war camp for years with only tiny amounts of

food. What makes surviving possible in these situations is your body’s remarkable ability to slow down calorie burning.

When your body notices calorie deprivation it says to itself, “It looks like this is all the food we’re going to be getting for a while, so we’d better stop burning up so many calories and start saving our energy. This

way we’ll be able to survive longer on the little amount of nutrition we have.” The starvation response has been developed largely because of exposure to extreme environmental conditions like droughts, natural disasters and food shortages. Furthermore, there were no supermarkets tens of thousands years
ago. If people wanted to eat, they had to either grow or kill their food.

It was likely at those times, that a man didn’t know when the next meal was coming and may actually have only eaten once or twice per week.The starvation response evolved in humans to ensure the survival of the 

species. That's why your body can’t tell the difference between dieting and starvation. 

This feature of human evolution is a blessing if you’re stranded out with no food. During periods of starvation, the body slowly begins to "feed off itself", burning fat stores, muscle and yes, even 

internal organs for energy. If your body continued to burn calories at its normal rate, your limited reserves of stored energy would be finished quickly and you would die very soon after your food supply was cut off. 

This response keeps you alive longer. Unfortunately for most of us, this same life-saving mechanism will work against you when you’re trying to lose weight, because your body can’t tell the difference between dieting and starvation! Cutting calories extremely always awakens your bodys starvation
mode. There’s little to nothing you can do to stop this from happening other than to avoid too extreme calorie deficits!

That's all for today. Tomorrow I'll continue with the same subject, and give you 7 very good reasons why to stay away from extremely low calorie diets!