Why Calorie Restriction Weight Loss Fails

It's critical to gain a clear understanding of the flawed mentality and approach that many devoted fitness enthusiasts follow to varying degrees while pursuing weight loss. By common definition, when you go on a "diet," you restrict the amount, content, combination or time that you eat your foods. It is difficult to succeed with this approach for the following reasons:

1. Impracticality of counting calories - It is unreasonable and practically impossible to count calories or caloric ratios of each meal on a long-term basis.

2. Varying daily caloric needs - Numerous variables affect your daily caloric needs, including activity level, stress level, environment and natural biorhythms. Your intuition and natural appetite will be far more effective than even a scientifically determined diet that requires a specified calorie level.

3. Nutrient deficiencies - Restrictive diets can leave you deficient in the vitamins, minerals, protein and essential fatty acids crucial for optimum health and recovery from exercise and other forms of stress.

4. Fatigue and stress response- The first thing you notice when you restrict calories is the effects of declining blood sugar levels and lowered fuel for working muscles and organs, including diminished energy and an inability to concentrate. Remember that your brain burns only glucose for fuel, so even sitting at your desk working can result in depletion if you don’t obtain nutritious calories. We often experience this daily when a busy life compromises perfect meal planning.

When you restrict calories over a significant period, your body adapts by engaging the "fight or flight" stress response. This chain reaction of metabolic functions brings several negative consequences, even while you enjoy "results" indicated by lower numbers on the scale. One component of the stress response to calorie restriction is something called gluconeogenesis. Your muscle tissue is broken down into glucose to maintain blood sugar levels in the absence of sufficient dietary calories. You actually consume your own lean muscle tissue to maintain steady energy and blood sugar levels. This can go on for days or even weeks as your body struggles to adapt to the stressful stimulus - whether it’s restricting calories or experiencing a personal crisis that kills your appetite and leaves you on edge.

You may have noticed during a sustained period of dieting or heavy personal stress that your weight drops quickly. While you will reduce excess body fat when you follow a low-carbohydrate diet or restrict calories in general, much of the weight lost, particularly initially, is in water and muscle tissue. Every gram of carbohydrate you eat binds in the muscles with three to four grams of water, so low-carb or calorie-restrictive diets generate quick weight loss. This water weight loss phenomenon equalizes in about 14 days, which is why this is a popularly quoted time frame for successful low-carb crash diets.

As you might guess, stressing your body through sustained calorie restriction comes with some unpleasant, long-term side effects. At some point, the fight or flight and gluconeogenesis mechanisms wear out when stress is unabated. With inadequate calories, your metabolic rate eventually slows (to compensate for what it perceives to be starvation), and you develop a physiological tendency to hoard fat. This is a genetically programmed starvation response dating back to the caveman days as a survival instinct. Some studies indicated that long-term dieting can lower your metabolism by up to 40 percent, a condition that takes up to one year to correct.

The key to successful long-term weight management lies is eliminating unhealthy foods from your diet (namely processed carbs, such as sugar and flour products, and unhealthy trans and hydrogenated fats), following a sensible exercise program that balances stress and rest effectively and achieving intermittent caloric deficits that develop your ability to access and burn stored body fat for energy. Future article_temps will detail how you can proceed with a natural weight loss program that delivers long-term results.