Traditional Diets DO NOT work:
The Every Other Day Diet is not a traditional diet, and I am having great success with it. Let me tell you how and why it works…
… but first a little background info.
I know it happens every year, particularly around Christmas time. We over-indulge, put on a few pounds (or worse), and make a New Year Resolution to lose the weight. We head off to the book store, pick up the latest fad diet book, and work our butts off to lose the weight we gained. More often than not, this weight loss will require calorie counting, or at least restricting what you eat to proportions that leave you hungry all day & night.
By reducing your intake of calories, you are not only starving your body of essential nutrients, but you are also changing the way your body reacts to food. You body goes into starvation mode, reducing your metabolism, and therefore your caloric requirements. In other words, your body starts requiring LESS calories to maintain itself.
OK, you lose a few pounds, but then likely plateau as continued starvation has little effect on your stubborn fat. It’s time to come off the diet and just be happy with what we lost, right?
The big problem is that your body is now in a different state to the one it was in when you started the diet. It now requires LESS calories to maintain your current weight, and since you are now off the diet, you go back to eating the way you use to (the way that got you those extra pounds in the first place). Eventually your metabolism returns to its original rate and your body weight starts to level off again, only this time at a higher weight than before your diet. You end up heavier than before your started that darn diet!
Many people will just hit another diet, and the same thing will happen. You’ll starve yourself to lose some weight, come off the diet and pile those pounds back on. There is a reason why the term yo-yo dieting is used for this type of behaviour.
Notice the upward trend in your weight? That’s quite typical of most calorie-starvation diets.
The big problem with these traditional diets is the change that happens in your metabolic rate as you remain on low calorie diets for so long. But what exactly is metabolic rate?
Think of your body as a machine that requires fuel. The fuel is anything that you put into your mouth. As you put more food into your system, your body “furnace” works at burning up that food into small units that can be used around the body. The more food you put in, the hotter the “furnace” and your metabolic rate increases. When food is in short supply (like when you are dieting), that body furnace has very little to fuel the flames, and your metabolic rate drops off. As metabolic rate falls, so does your capacity to burn up calories.
Think of it this way. Paul has a low metabolic rate, and Julie has a high metabolic rate. Each eats a piece of cake with 900 calories. Paul is less able to burn up those calories to use as energy in his body, whereas Julie’s high metabolic rate quickly turns that cake into energy to be used around her body. The outcome is that while the cake is not great for either person, Julie is unlikely to store it as fat, whereas Paul’s body will. Paul’s body will use what it can for energy, and send the rest to the fat processing plant.
If calories eaten exceeds calories required by the body, then excess calories can be stored as fat.
If calories eaten are less than calories required, then the body will make up the difference by burning up some of its own tissue (hopefully fat tissue but not always).
The interesting bit in the above statement is the “calories required” bit. The higher your metabolic rate, the more calories your body will require.
One of the secrets then of any diet is to keep the metabolic rate high. The very best way of doing this is to increase your levels of activity. Increased activity means increased metabolic rate.
Therein lies the prob
lem. Most people who want to lose weight don’t want to have to increase their exercise levels because they either cannot be bothered, or they don’t think they have time. Unfortunately these people are more likely to stay fat.
Increasing exercise levels can mean just going for a 30 minute walk three times a week. If that isn’t something you have been doing so far, then that’s constitutes an increase in activity levels. Walks can be fun, and if you have an iPod, you can listen to music, catch up with podcasts, even learn a foreign language (something I do on my weekly walks)
