Why Your Diet Isn't Working

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Your body is an amazing machine. While you eat, sleep and carry on with life, it performs thousands of calibrations that most of us are never aware of. But not all of those subcutaneous processes work in our favor all of the time. That is especially true when you're dieting. By cutting your calories in an attempt to lose weight, you may be triggering your body to work against you to hold on to the pounds. 

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Understanding "Starvation Mode"

Your body is perfectly designed to protect itself against starving. Deprive it from calories and it sends signals to your brain to hold on to calories longer, burn fat more sparingly and stimulate the hunger response designed to drive you to eat. 

So as hard as you work to skip meals and deprive yourself, your body is struggling in the other direction to hold on to everything it has. Consequently, dieting is an uphill battle for some people. They work and struggle but never realize that a fight against thousands of years of evolution is one that they are not going to win.

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The Yo-Yo

The frustration of an uphill diet battle can cause dieters to stop or take a break. Or, sometimes dieters manage to get to their goal weight. Whatever the reason, you return to your normal eating habits or even modified eating habits that call for slightly more calories than your diet did. 

But although you're done starving, your body may not be. Once you've triggered "starvation mode" it's not so easy to turn off. Even though you're eating more, your body is still hoarding calories and stored fat for the long fast. And you may begin to put on weight and start the upward swing of the yo yo diet. Some dieters even find that they end up weighing more after a diet than they did before it.

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So What Do I Do?

The key to a successful diet is to work with your body, not against it. Now that you know that periods of starvation induce "starvation mode", stop starving. Calculate the number of calories that you need to eat a day to reach your goal weight using an online weight calculator. 

Then simply divide those calories into six small meals per day. Plan to eat one of these meals once every three hours or so. These many small meals will start to do several important things for your diet. 

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Dieting the Right Way

The most important of those is metabolic stimulation. Because your stomach receives calories regularly throughout the day, it will feel safe in releasing some of its stored energy instead of hoarding it for a fast. This release of energy will speed up your metabolism and allow your body to drop fat and burn calories more easily. 

The second positive effect of a mini meal plan is that it helps you battle hunger. When your day is filled with small meals, your stomach is never empty enough to trigger the hunger signals that are the hallmark of "starvation mode". Without these hunger signals, you'll be less likely to binge eat and ruin your diet. 

Dr. Sharon

Once you learn to work with your body instead of against it, you'll start to see progress in your diet. But dieting alone isn't enough to lose weight. To keep your metabolism acting, you must combine your diet with regular exercise. First, consult your physician to see what exercise is appropriate for your age, lifestyle and level of health. Then combine it with your new mini meal plan and let me know about your progress in the comments section!