This Diet Worked Before - Why Doesn't It Work Now?

Find out what your body knows that you don't. If you have tried several times to lose weight, and it doesn't seem to work as well as before, you might be in for a surprise.

Have you ever heard of hibernation mode? When a bear stores up fat for the winter, his body goes into a hibernation mode. It stops burning that fat at the normal rate. The bear's metabolism says,"Hey, remember the last time when the food stopped coming for a couple months? It looks like that's going to happen again. If there is going to be a food shortage for the next couple months, I won't burn the calories." The bear has a built-in system for not losing weight based on the food supply called the hibernation mode.

You have the same thing.

This is natural in your own body, just like the bear's, as a heartbeat. You can't dictate to it any more than you can make your heart change its rhythm. Here is you experience: When you go on a diet for the very first time, your body doesn't realize that this will only be temporary, so it just keeps on burning the calories at the normal rate leading to your desired weight loss. You take off the pounds and everything is terrific. That happens the first time.

Here you can see that as you lose all the weight you wanted to, and are very happy with the results, your body is asking what had happened to the food supply. It make the decision that "When the food comes back I'm going to have to store up, so I'm ready if this happens again."

You are happy. So happy, in fact, that once you have achieved your weight loss goal, you revert to the same eating and exercise habits that led to the diet in the first place. You don't know that your body is making plans to keep some extra weight in case it needs it in the future.

After a while you realize you put all the weight back on. You go right back to that great diet that helped you lose all that weight, but something different happens this time: the weight doesn't come off the same way.

Why? Your body has activated the hibernation mode. Just like the bear going into the winter, your body recognizes that the food supply has just shut down so it takes an animal instinct function of "winterizing" the metabolism. "Hey, there's no food coming in again! I remember this! It must be hibernation time! I won't burn the calories."

That is not a choice that you consciously make, it's an animal reaction. Your body's physiology accepts the food cutoff and responds to it. The diet takes longer and longer to get the job done, but eventually you reach your goal weight, and go off the diet and back to your old ways. You start piling on the pounds faster now, because your body, again, is making a survival decision: fatten up, because there will be more of these winter periods, and they may get a lot longer. You get into the well known "yo-yo" pattern: put a little on and fight to get it off, then put more on, then take that off, and over and over and over.

This is the whole problem. As you go on a diet for a fix for your weight situation, you have to be aware that part of your brain is not going to co-operate. Your brain won't let you lose weight time after time on the same plan.

Bottom line: Weight loss isn't about a short term change in your food intake. True weight loss is about long term change in your eating habits. If you eat too much for your body to burn, you will get fat. Worse, if you eat and stop eating time after time your body will store fat from every meal. If your body sees the food supply shutting down it will tell your metabolism to burn calories more slowly, so you may only use 1500 calories the next day instead of 2500. Instead of losing weight, because your body doesn't want to let you starve, you may go on a diet and gain weight.

In truth, the only way you can control weight loss is to take away the need. Study your own habits that are leading to weight gain and change them. That means food intake, diet, and exercise. Ugh, exercise! You know, like when you go to the gym and work out, and then stop on the way home for an ice cream. Your mind is thinking about losing weight, but your body is saying that you deserve the ice cream for having worked out, but actually your body is tricking you into adding more calories so it can keep itself going.