Personal growth and self improvement articles on dieting

Dieting and Weight Loss Articles

Why Do Diets Stop Working?
By Andrea Albright

Have you ever lost weight on a diet? And didn't you feel
great while it was happening.

It's a joy to spring out of bed in the morning and jump on
the scale first thing you get filled up with a euphoric
feeling as you watch the number creep down-down-down. Every day the number is going down, and everyday your euphoric high goes up-up-up.

Have you ever felt this euphoric "dieting high"? Then you
know how exciting it can be.

It is so exciting to think that this time, you are going to
get the body you've always wanted you are FINALLY going to reach your "goal weight". Maybe you even went through your closet and threw away all of your fat pants because you knew for sure that you would never need them again.

But the closer you got to your "goal weight", the harder it
became to lose any more weight.

One day you jumped onto the scale and realized that it's not
going down anymore.

The weight loss has stopped. The scale isn't budging.

What happened?

Why did your diet stop working?

After decades of dieting where I would lose a bunch of
weight and be so excited about the new body I was going to
have and then only to have my dreams crushed by the scale
when the pounds started creeping back up again. I set out to
learn everything I could about the science of losing weight
and WHY DIETS STOP WORKING.

Here are some of the fascinating things I discovered:

1. Your Body Is A Highly Advanced Machine

I used to think that I could "out-smart" my body. That all
I had to do was tell my body what I wanted it to do and then
it would happen.

I did everything I could to make my body thin (counting
calories, starvation diets, extreme exercise, you name it!)
but my body never responded like I wanted it to. In fact,
all my hard-forced efforts only made things worse. My body
got fatter.

That's because I didn't understand how my body worked.

See, our bodies have evolved over tens of thousands of years
to live through difficult times. And one of the biggest
evolutionary advantages it has is to deal with times when
the food runs out.

This used to happen a lot before the modern age. Now there
is a fast-food restaurant and a convenient store on every
block, but for thousands of years food was scarce. There
were droughts that caused famines, there were natural
disasters that wiped out entire crops of food, and there
were times when food was not available on a regular or
reliable basis. In fact, this was more the norm than the
exception.

And so our bodies have evolved to deal with these times
without food. It's called "starvation mode" and your body
will switch into it very quickly unless you know how to
switch it off.

And it's when your body is in this "starvation mode" that
things get very bad.

2. Your Metabolism Adjusts Very Quickly

Your metabolism is simply the rate at which you burn through
calories. And you get calories (or units of energy) from
the food you eat.

When you go on a "diet", in the beginning you lose weight
fast but eventually your body recognizes that there has
been a change in the food supply. Your body catches on that
you are not eating the same amount of calories as before.
This signals your body to go into "starvation mode" and slow
down your metabolism.

Here you are dieting to try to lose weight and your body is
slowing down your metabolism, isn't that frustrating?!

Here's why this happens when your body slows down your
metabolism, it is trying to conserve the precious few
calories you are consuming to maintain its vital life
functions like heartbeat, breathing, digestion, etc. And it
will do this by taking energy away from high-calorie organs
like your brain. (If you've ever wondered why you get so
foggy-headed, and feel so crappy while you are dieting, it's
because your body is taking energy away from your brain and
conserving it for life energy to keep you alive.)

When you diet, you are training your body to slow down your
metabolism and this is the opposite of what you want to do
for permanent weight loss. There is a much better way.

3. When You Are Dieting You Are Creating Stress

The more stress you have, the more weight you will gain.
The modern life is filled with a constant bombardment of
stress, and when you go on a diet you are accelerating that
stress exponentially.

You are constantly having to think about what food you are
going to eat, at what time and how much and you're
measuring your success every day by weighing yourself. If
the scale goes down, you feel great but what about when it
goes up? You feel like crap all day long, right? Well,
this adds to your stress.

And the more stressed out you are, the more your entire
internal universe will be all "out-of-whack". It will be
chaos inside of you and the outside will reflect that.

The more you are trying to force your body to lose weight by
dieting, the more stressed out you are going to be and the
more weight you are going to gain. And the farther you go
into your diet, the more stressful it becomes. And
eventually the weight loss stops and the pounds start
creeping back up often more quickly than you lost the weight
in the first place.

And then how stressed out do you feel? All of your hard
work and effort has been washed away. Then you feel like a
failure and like you have no "will-power" because you can't
stick with a diet but this approach to weight loss is wrong
and will always set you up to fail.

The only way to lose weight permanently is to work with your
body. You want to naturally speed up your metabolism so you
have amazing energy all day long.

There is a proven way to train your body to stop storing
fat and there is no "torture" or pain involved. This
healthy approach to weight loss is peaceful and balanced and
will give you the continuous motivation to succeed because
it will feel so good.

If you're ready to jump off the dieting roller-coaster where
you lose weight and then gain even more weight back again
and again and if you're ready to learn the secrets that I
have discovered for natural and permanent weight loss that
have worked for thousands of others (including myself) then
you should go here to get lots more great free tips:

Healthy Weight Loss

http://www.amazingbodynow.com

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About the Author

Andrea Albright is a certified yoga instructor, a published author, and has university degrees in both Biology and Spanish. Because of her healthy diet tips, she has also become known in the world of "big business diets" as the woman with a dangerous secret...

Andrea grew up eating the typical American diet, and by the time she reached her late teens she realized that she was gaining weight rapidly. She dieted her way through college only to discover that, despite constantly denying herself and cycling through diet after diet, she was 8 dress sizes bigger by the end of the 4 years. How could this be?

In the years during and after college, armed with a degree in biology, Andrea dug deep into the science, the pharmacology, the evolutionary biomorphism, and biochemistry of weight loss and tried every promising exercise and diet program she could find to lose weight...

Her big breakthrough didn't come from a diet, a pill, or an exercise, but through an "awakening" that completely changed her life and set her on a completely new course of health and consciousness. By surrendering beliefs that had crippled her ability to succeed and emotionally sabotaged her attempts to become healthy, Andrea found a radically new path to permanent weight loss.

Along this path she discovered the untruths (and outright lies) that have been sold to so many desperate dieters in the past decades, uncovered the truth about how the processed food business is destroying our health, and how to TEACH OTHERS the joyful path of loving your body into health and fitness.

Andrea is the author of a free weekly weight loss and health newsletter, and the eBook "How To Lose Weight By Feeding And Nourishing Your Spirit"

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