Diets Damage Metabolism

When we see beautiful models in magazines and svelte actresses in movies, we are tempted to cut down on our eating in order to lose weight and look more like them.  We decide to stop eating as much so we can drops some pounds.  Less food taken in should mean you’ll lose weight quickly, right?
Not necessarily.  Our bodies are very efficient at storing food as fat as a defense against starvation.  When you cut your calories, and if you do it drastically enough, your body panics.  Think of it in terms of an army and its rations.
Body:          “Danger! Danger!  There’s not enough food!  We’re starving!”
Metabolism:    “Cut down on production, we’re going into survival mode! Slow and steady! Emphasis on the slow!”
Body:          “Just make sure we have enough fat stores to get through this famine.”
Metabolism:    “Aye Aye, Captain!”
Orders have been given and the next thing you know, you have are miserable because you have not only NOT lost weight on your diet,  you have rebounded and GAINED.  You have also gained any number of unattractive fat stores which get created in order to make sure that your body doesn’t starve.
Think of it as the general of an army, laying in stores for a very long winter. When your body is in survival mode, it takes fewer calories to sustain itself, to maintain its current weight.
Excess calories are stored as fat, and the rations are parceled out to the soldiers reluctantly and very slowly in order to make sure the resources last as long as possible.
Severe restriction of calories is a sure fire way to cause your metabolism to slow down to a crawl.  So if you’ve been crash dieting for years without exercising, then your metabolism most likely has been affected.
Dieting like this burns muscle, and the less muscle mass you have, the less calories you burn, and the slower your metabolism. You will now need fewer calories to maintain your current weight.  This means that if you consume more calories, your body won’t need to use them for energy and will store them.  You will actually rebound and gain weight, and it will be that much harder to lose it.  Remember, it only takes 2000 calories to gain a pound, but 3,500 to lose one.
When you put the weight back on, and you will if you’ve been crash dieting, then it will be put back on as fat.  This means that your metabolic rate has probably dropped a little bit each time that you’ve crash dieted.
Putting on more fat and losing muscle will cause your metabolism to slow down even more. It seems like a cycle of doom, doesn’t it?
It can be if you don’t break that feast or famine cycle.  But you can learn how to increase your metabolism in order to burn the most calories possible, even when you’re sleeping.