It doesn’t matter what diet plan you’ve chosen to tackle your weight problem, any diet plan if it’s a properly set up plan or a poorly set up one, you are going to face some metabolic slow down.
This slow-down is natural and normal because the body is sensing that it’s not getting as much energy as it needs to meet its daily requirements so it begins to slow down certain processes. The extent of this slow-down is in direct relation to how severe your diet plan is. Those with lower calorie intakes will suffer a greater slow-down.
This is precisely why “crash diets” do not work. Your body feels threatened when you take in so few calories and it goes into supreme-defense mode trying to preserve every last calorie. The first process to go is usually the menstrual cycle in women as the body knows that it does not need to send energy there in order to survive.
Other processes that can occur on low-calorie diets:
- Tiredness; your available energy will suffer and you will feel tired all the time.
- Constant desire to sleep (remember sleeping burns very little energy)
- Stressed Immune System; you’ll get sick much easier
- Less bone remodeling; a higher risk of bone breaks and fractures
- Digestive issues due to lack of production of key enzymes (this also occurs because of certain types of foods being cut out of the diet)
- Lower body temperature; energy is burned off as heat so when your metabolism slows down your core temperature drops significantly.
None of these are pleasant side effects but cannot be avoided if the particular diet plan you’ve chosen takes in fewer calories than your body needs to maintain its body weight.
However there are strategies you can employ.
Managing your leptin levels are the real secret to preventing the natural metabolic slow-down that occurs when dieting. Leptin is the hormone responsible for monitoring how much current body fat you have as well as how much energy is coming in on a day to day basis.
As soon as leptin senses that either of these two is dropping, it begins to signal the body to decrease metabolic rate in order to prevent starvation from occurring. If you can manage your leptin levels effectively you can stop this problem.
Another strategy you can employ to prevent your metabolism from slowing down is to add “refeeds” into your diet that boost calorie intake significantly to throw your body off as well as making sure that you are not dieting extensively for long periods of time.
If you don’t utilize strategies to prevent your metabolism from slowing, you can actually start maintaining your body weight on a very low calorie intake diet.
This turns into a very bad situation as your calorie intake is already so low that to take it down any further could lead to mal-nutrition and an over-all unhealthy body.
This is often experienced as “diet plateau”, something that many dieters experience at one point or another. Hopefully you can now see why it’s problematic for weight maintenance.
If you raise your calorie intake up so that you don’t lose any more weight you’ll find your metabolism is so sluggish at this point that you’re already practically at weight maintenance with your current intake which means you will now start to gain body weight.
If you were losing weight incredibly slow on the diet you were on, rest assured that when you come off that diet and eat normally you will be packing those pounds back on that you worked so hard to take off.
And so the body weight bounce occurs.
It’s time to discover why both your body and your mind need to be healthy and aligned if you hope to take weight off and keep it off permanently. “Rebound Free Weight Loss” is exactly the help you are looking for.
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