Your body is going to answer differently than you. If you have tried several times to lose weight, and it doesn’t seem to work as well as before, you might have a problem that you don’t know about.
When a bear stores up fat for the winter, he’s getting ready to hibernate. He stops burning that fat at the normal rate. The bear’s internal metabolism says,”Hey, about a year ago the food stopped coming in for months. It looks like that’s going to happen again. I better not burn the fat calories.” The bear has a built-in system for this. It’s called the hibernation mode. It isn’t something the bear thinks about and plans. His body just determines that there are interuptions in the food supply, so it prepares for them.
You have the same thing.
This is a physiological instinct. It is as natural in your own body, or the bear’s, as a heartbeat. You can’t dictate to it or control it any more than you can make your heart change rhythm. Here is what happens in a person: When you decide to go on a diet for the very first time, your body doesn’t realize that this will be a temporary suspension of intake, so it just keeps on burning the calories at the normal rate which leads to a great weight loss. You slim right down, and everything is terrific. That happens the first time.
The problem is, and I’m sure you will recognize it, that as you lose whatever weight you wanted to take off and are very happy with the results, your body is asking what happened to the food supply. It starts to say “When the food comes back I’m going to have to store some of it, just in case this happens again.”
Now you are happy because you lost the weight. So happy, in fact, that once you have gotten to your weight loss goal, you’re right back to the same eating and exercise habits that led you to the diet in the first place. But, your body is making plans to keep store extra weight in case it runs out of food again.
Then, after a while you look in the mirror and realize you put all the weight back on. You go back to that great diet that helped you lose all that weight, but something different happens this time: the weight doesn’t melt off.
Why? Your body has activated its hibernation mode. Your body recognizes that the food supply has just shut down so it takes an animal instinct function of “winterizing” the metabolism. When there’s no food coming in it must be hibernation time! I won’t burn the calories.
That is not a choice that you knowingly make, it’s simply a reaction. Your body’s physiology recognizes the food cutoff and responds to it. The diet takes longer and longer to get the job done, but eventually you reach your goal weight, and go off the diet and back to your old ways. You start piling on the pounds faster now, because your body is making a survival decision: fatten up, because there will be more of these winter periods, and they may get a lot longer. You get into the well known “yo-yo” pattern: put a little on and fight to get it off, then put more on, then take that off, and over and over and over.
There you have it. The whole problem. If you go on a diet with the intention of it being a quick fix for your weight situation, you have to be aware that part of your brain is not going to co-operate. It won’t let you lose weight time after time on the same plan.
It comes down to this: True weight loss is not about a short term change in your food intake. Weight loss is about long term change. If you eat too much for your body to burn, you will put on fat, but your body wants to defend itself from short-term food shortages. So if your body sees the food supply shutting down it will tell your metabolism to burn calories more slowly, so you may only use 1500 calories the next day instead of 2500. Instead of losing weight, because your body doesn’t want to let you starve, you may go on a diet and gain weight.
In truth, the only way you can control weight loss is to take away the need. Study your own habits that are leading to weight gain and change them. That means food intake, diet, and exercise. Ugh, exercise! You know, like when you go to the gym and work out, and then stop on the way home for an ice cream. Your mind is thinking about losing weight, but your body is saying that you deserve the ice cream for having worked out, but actually your body is tricking you into adding more calories so it can keep itself going.
Before you start your diet, you should read this. Why diet plans don’t always work You might have a problem with your diet.Why diet plans don’t always work will give you the straight answer.
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