Weight loss is one of the most common, perennial problems that each one of us has to go through. At one point in your life, I am quite sure that the thought of losing a few pounds here and there entered your mind too (unless of course you are one of the lucky ones who can eat anything they want and easily burn it up because of their naturally fast metabolism). I want to let you in on a little secret, but I know it will be hard for you to accept this fact: diets do not work and they never will. You will have to do more than that if you want to lose weight for good?

Now, now, I am starting to feel the commotion here. Diets do not work? Am I sure about that? Well just like I told you, I know that you will have a hard time accepting this but in reality what I said about dieting is actually true. Doing a diet only messes up your body’s natural eating patterns. In the end, you will only gain back the weight that you lost just because diets do not work over the long term. Don’t believe me? Read on and you will find out why soon.

Why Diets Do Not Work

If you want to lose weight permanently, going on a diet is not the answer for you. Like what I said earlier, going on a diet will only mess up your metabolism and it will be more detrimental for your body in the long run. The key to weight loss is actually very simple: burn more and store less calories. If you can burn calories at a faster rate than you can consume, the difference would be subtracted from your stored body fat. Continuously doing this would lead to weight loss, and that is actually all that there is to it.

Diets Do Not Work For Long-Term Weight Loss? Really?

Now here is the tricky part. Diets do not work for long-term weight loss because they are meant to be temporary fixes. That s just their nature. You can’t expect diets to work over long periods of time because the body cannot sustain eating less food than what it needs. Ever wondered why there are so many diets out there? Yeah, that’s right. Because they DO NOT WORK for long periods of time. The diet programs that you know today will be replaced by more diet programs in the future. It’s is just a vicious cycle of losing and gaining weight again and again, and you are helplessly caught in the middle of it all.

Let me tell you more about why diets do not work if you want to lose weight permanently.

Most diet programs tell you to eat less food to burn calories right? To tell you the truth, this is one of the worst ways for you to lose weight. When you eat less food than what you really need, it is true that you can lose weight. But you are losing weight because you are DEPRIVING your body of food, which is not good. When you eat less food, your body slows down your metabolism because it “thinks” that you are low on resources. Now, your body doesn’t know that you are doing it on purpose, it only wants to protect you by keeping a stronger hold to your fats and slowing your metabolism even more.

Now here is the catch: when you go on a diet for extended periods of time, your body reaches a point where it can’t take no more. You will start to feel easily tired and irritated and seeing food can even make you salivate (not kidding, this happens). When you reach the point where you can’t take it anymore, you will go out on a phase of uncontrollable eating. And because you have a slowed down metabolism now due to extended periods of eating little food, you will store calories at a higher and faster rate. In the end, you can even gain more weight than you begin with.

So if diets do not work, what should you do to lose weight?

If you really want to lose weight permanently, depriving yourself of food is not going to work. What you need to do is go back to the basics of the weight loss equation: Take in less calories and burn out more to create a difference. Going on a diet isn’t going to cut it out because you aren’t burning calories when you don’t eat. You are just taking a shortcut and setting yourself up for a big failure.

Changing your mentality is the first way to accepting the hard truth that diets do not work. If you want to create a significant caloric difference in order to lose weight, you have to work hard and earn it with your sweat. Doing exercises that helps you burn fat is the only way to lose weight permanently. But getting over the initial hump would be the hardest part of it all, which is why you need to absolutely change the way you look at things. I hope that this post was helpful to you!