In this article you'll learn why most of the people going on a diet fails. Recent statistics tells us that almost 95% of the people who wants to lose weight fails. Why do they fail and why is it so hard to lose weight?
To be successful you just can start on a diet. A diet is more of a symptomatic treatment and it doesn't treat the real reason for you being overweight. The 5% that succeeds are those that make a profound change in their lifestyle. You have to change your attitude towards food, cooking and ingredients. Exercise is usually a an important ingredient in the new life.
A diet can help if it is holistic and take every part of your life into the diet. There are a few that are proven to do really well, weightwatchers are one of those, another one is called 'Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle'. Those diet plans gives you a fundamental ideology on a healthy lifestyle.
Many of the modern diets is based upon excluding a certain group of foods. The Atkins diet is one of the most well-known. From my perspective it seems unhealthy to exclude a basic ingredient in our metabolism. Those who follow this diet strictly will get a condition called ketoacidosis and once achieved your breath will start to smell like acetone (nail-polish remover). Healthy? -I don't know, but it burns fat. Are we really that eager to lose weight?
Other diets based on non-fat and low-calorie are also great for losing weight in a short period of time but once you start to eat normally you gain the pounds you lost. Why? - Well, for example, if you go on a low calorie diet you lose some weight in the first days but then your body adjusts its metabolism to burn less calories.
Let's say that you eat 2500 calories today and tomorrow you start a low calorie diet, eating an extreme 600 calories per day. First of all, you will feel a string hunger for more food, you will be easily irritated and have a hard time to concentrate. After 3 days you have lost a couple of pounds but your body still wants more calories but it is starting to adopt to this starvation-like calorie intake. Then the body goes into starvation-mode and you stop burning much more calories. The body is a great mechanism.
After one week on this extreme diet you may have lost up to 7 pounds but you don't feel very well. After the diet ends and you go back to eating normally your body is still in starvation-mode and it starts to save all of the extra calories and where do the body save those calories? - In fat tissue, and that means that you most likely gain the pounds you tortured your self to lose.
Besides weightwatchers and 'Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle' there is a diet that doesn't require such a profound change and it is called calorie-shifting. It is not a new diet, it has been around for the last decades but recently it got a twist. With this diet you get to eat four times per day and at every meal you may eat just short of full. calorie-shifting means that you eat different kinds of calories every day and thus tricking your body into a fat-burning mode. You see, the body adjusts the metabolism based on the previous 2-3 days of calorie-intake (that is why low-calorie diet isn't any good). Now, if you shift between various food groups and calories the body won't know what you are going to eat next and it accelerates the metabolism by using energy stored in fat tissue.
Calorie-shifting diets are based on cycles and in this new version that means that you are on the diet for eleven days and then you get three free days where you are allowed to eat almost anything and then you go back on the diet for another eleven days. There are reports telling us that an average weight loss during every cycle is almost 10 pounds!
