Attempted but Failed to Lose Weight?

by | Jun 27, 2011 | Health Habits, Nutrition Support, Uncategorized

“90% of all human diseases originate from the stomach”

Read Healthy Eating Facts about Your Food & Disease →

Many people say they’ve tried everything but nothing worked – some or the other weight loss diet plan, exercise, dieting… Let’s analyze and identify the reasons why we often don’t achieve our weight loss goals and in doing so, hopefully, induce you to try again.

Clinically speaking,

any reason you put forth for having given up your weight loss plan would fall into one of these three categories:

a)    You feel hungry and are unable to control your urge to eat

b)    You are not sufficiently incentivized – getting back in shape is not a matter of life and death situation

c)    There are too many ‘hectic’ or ‘bad days’ in your schedule that interfere with your diet plans.

Let’s take these one at a time.

Most of us who need to diet have a love-hate relationship with food.

Before we eat it, we love it but after we’ve eaten it, we hate it. The hate is directed 50% towards ourselves for our lack of control and 50% at the food for making us overweight. Having gorged on a plate of some unhealthy delicacy, we proceed to punish ourselves by not eating over the next day or eating less than the required portions.

Overall, dieters eat less than they should be eating.

When we eat less quantity than our stomach is used to or eat less than our daily requirement of calories, our stomach triggers hunger pangs. These hunger pangs are triggered in an effort to make good the deficit and protect the body from malnourishment – its genetic programming. Because the hunger pangs are usually quite strong and insistent, we end up gorging ourselves on anything handy. This usually means a bag of chips or dropping in at the neighborhood fast food joint. Not good! This is also why low-calorie diet plans never work. It’s a viscous cycle – the less we eat, the more hungry we are and hence more likely to go bonkers and toss the weight loss diet plan out of the window.

So don’t skip meals. Any diet or weight loss plan that includes skipping meals isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on or the time you’ve spent reading it.

Skipping meals is counter productive and goes against genetically established pattern –

don’t try to circumvent it. Your total daily calorie intake should not fall below 1700 per day. Also, if meals are regular, your body burns fat more efficiently than if meals are irregular. Our body is genetically programmed to equate lack of food with starvation and a sign of bad times. The geeks would tell you that the ‘store food’ command would be triggered i.e. accumulate fat. Spot on!

So whatever you do,

don’t let your total calorie intake fall below 1700 a day and spread it across 4 or 5 smallish meals taken at regular intervals.

Read the next blog post if you want to learn about the role of incentives in any weight loss or diet plan.