Sunday, June 23, 2013

Why Fad Diets Do Not Return Good Results

By Howe Russ


Have you ever felt like you can't lose weight on a low calorie diet no matter how much exercise you do in the gym? If so, you are certainly not alone in that situation. In fact, around 80 percent of gym members have hit this point at some stage in the past and don't know how to get around it.

Before you go any further with your diet or exercise routine, eliminating what is not currently working is your priority.

There is a major issue with all individuals who reach this sticking point. They share two things in common:

1. They eat less than 1000 calories per day.

2. They spend their time doing endless hours of cardiovascular activity.

Should you recognize any of the above conditions in your current predicament you need to change tactics. Overdoing the cv exercise and eating too little food is a sure-fire way to blast your body into a plateau.

The most commonly made mistake is presuming that starting a diet means ditching all of your favorite foods and replacing them with lettuce. This is definitely not the case. We're in danger of killing off our own progress by essentially chopping our calorie intake so much that we begin pushing our body into starvation mode and locking our ability to burn unwanted fat. When we are taking in too few calories, our body reacts by switching to a defensive strategy in a bid to keep your system functioning as normal. If you are not eating enough you will notice it becomes significantly harder for your to lose fat.

If you do manage to push your body into starvation mode, your metabolism will take a battering. It can slow down considerably in an attempt to stop you from burning the nutrients it needs to survive, the same nutrients you are restricting in your diet. That's why you'll often hear people wondering why they cannot lose any more fat despite eating only a little amount of food and working out a lot.

Furthermore, long steady state cardio workouts have been well documented for their ability to cause muscle breakdown. That's right, not only are you burning less fat in the gym but you are also losing lean muscle tissue. Endless hours on the treadmill is not necessary to drop some weight.

If you have done this in the past, or are doing it right now, you need to change your approach if you are to see any upturn in the results you hope to achieve. Start by dismissing the notion of starving yourself and try to consume a calorie intake of roughly 12 times your goal body weight in pounds. If that is a massive jump from where you are at right now, then simply go up in stages week by week instead of a big sudden jump.

It would also be worth taking a week to familiarize yourself with high intensity interval training, or HIIT for short, which has been scientifically accepted as a superior method for blasting adipose tissue. It also provides you with shorter, more enjoyable workout sessions.

Before you jump to the conclusion that you can't lose weight on a low calorie diet and workout program, look at why you aren't seeing any results. By incorporating the latest science, as we have done today, you can see that the solution to your problem is not very complex at all.




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