Weight Loss for the Long Term

Yo-Yo Dieting. The weight comes off, and before long, it's back and you have a few additional pounds to go along with it. You start over, get all that weight off, and it comes back, with yet more weight. The process goes on and on in a continuous, never ending circle that overweight people often consider a never ending nightmare.

People who have never had to endure a weight problem just don't understand. They think that overweight people lack control, and this just is not true in most cases. The problem isn't the person, or even the eating habits in most cases - the problem is that the body is not designed to diet - and when we do diet, the body ‘malfunctions' even though we don't realize it.

You see, when you start a diet, you typically cut calories. This forces your body to go into starvation mode. It starts using muscle for fuel, and stores fat, thinking that it will need that fat for survival, because it is starving! The muscle it is feeding on is the muscle that is needed to burn the fat that the body is working hard to hold onto.

You are losing muscle that you need to lose fat because you are starving your body. This automatically sets you up for failure. Consider that we are indeed only human, and we can only go without food for a short period of time before our survival instincts take over and we go back to eating. The body reacts to this as well.

The body knows you've already tried to starve it once, and you may do so again - so, when you start eating again, it goes back to using that food for fuel, but it also stores more fat faster. This is why you typically gain back all the weight that you lost, plus several more extra pounds. The body is reacting to what you've done to it.

Long term weight loss typically means a lifestyle change. Getting the weight off is actually easier than you think. Keeping the weight off, however, is another story.

You don't want, or need, to eat less food. What you need to do is to eat better foods. Make better choices. Don't allow your body to think that it is starving. Many successful dieters eat six smaller meals a day for this purpose. Choose baked and broiled foods over fried foods. Choose crunchy vegetables over crunchy potato chips. Choose health bars over candy bars.

You also have to move. You cannot live a sedentary lifestyle and expect to get or keep weight off. This doesn't mean that you have to do aerobics, painful exercises, or lift weights either. Simply taking a thirty minute walk each day will do. As you start to lose weight, you may want to do a strength training program to get your muscles back into shape and get rid of flab as well. Strength training programs typically consists of exercises with smaller weights that are smooth, slow and painless.