Why do you gain back the weight you’ve lost after dieting?
And… Is there a better way?
You know the frustration… you diet, you work hard at it, you lose weight. You might get to a target you’ve set yourself or your ‘goal weight’. But then, you stop counting and attempt to go back to your regular style of eating, and before you know it, you’ve regained the weight you lose, and possibly have even added some more. Why is this? And why can a low carb diet change this?
There is a difference between ‘weight loss’ and ‘fat loss’, and this can explain why you regain weight.
Weight loss obviously means what it says… that you have lost weight, according to the scales that you are using to check your body mass. The problem with this is that weight loss includes lost body water, and lost muscle mass, in addition to the fat you have lost.
Why is this a problem?
If your goal is to lower your body fat, then you should be wary of diets that can’t differentiate between the loss of fat and the loss of muscle mass. These type of diets typically include the low fat, calorie restricted diet where you are counting how much you eat in some way or another.
When you lose muscle mass, you actually lower your body’s ability to burn fat, which makes it highly likely that you’ll gain back the weight you’ve lost. Muscles are huge fat burning machines. The more you have, the more fat you’ll burn. So, if you start dieting and your diet has you losing muscle as part of your ‘weight loss’, you’re not going to be able to keep that weight loss going, and you are very likely to regain the weight.
How do you solve this problem?
You need to diet plan that protects your muscles from being lost, while targeting fat burning. In an ideal world, you also want a diet where you are not hungry 24/7! Is this possible? You bet it is!
Enter the Low Carb Diet
You may have heard about low carb diets (AKA ketogenic diet) and wondered what they are all about. Let’s have a quick look at the history of how we have been taught to eat.
Once upon a time, we humans ate a diet of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds. We didn’t eat concentrated starchy foods such as breads, pasta, rice and potatoes until relatively recently, leaving us little time to adapt to these foods which are very energy dense (i.e. can make you gain weight), but poor in nutritional quality.
Then, in the 1980’s, came the low fat revolution. Fat was bad, it was going to raise your cholesterol and kill you any which way you ate it. We became scared of eating fat. The food manufacturers knew that if you take the fat out of food, it doesn’t taste as good, so to overcome that, they added sugar. Also, when you have less fat in your diet, you feel hungrier, so we filled up on breads and pastas, rice and potatoes.
The trouble with this is that these foods very quickly turn to sugar in your body.
Your body is a sugar bowl
Just for a moment, I want you to think of your body like a sugar bowl. It’s literally full of sugar. Our bodies store sugar so that we always have some available to make energy with. When you eat food that is broken down in the body to sugar, or to glucose, you get more sugar, and it’s floating around in your bloodstream. These foods are carbohydrates, and they are your fruit, vegetables, cereals, bread, grains and starches.
Now, sugar in your bloodstream is very dangerous to your body. It causes a lot of damage to your cells. So, your body, in it’s infinite wisdom, has a way to get that sugar out of your bloodstream. It’s a hormone called insulin.
The fat storing hormone
You’ve probably heard about insulin before, especially if you’ve known someone with diabetes. Insulin is released by your pancreas, and it’s job is primarily to get that sugar out of your bloodstream. How does it do that? By packing it away into your body. Some of this is put into your sugar storage places, such as your muscles, to be used to make energy. Some of it is used up by your brain. And, some of it is stored as fat. Insulin is the fat storing hormone. So, when there is insulin around, your body is in fat storing mode. It wouldn’t matter how much you exercised or how much low fat food you ate, when there is insulin around, you’re not going to be losing any fat. Fullstop.
Normally, your body uses glucose (sugar, carbohydrates,) as it’s source of fuel for making energy and to run your body. The problem with this is that while your body is using carbohydrates as it’s fuel, it is also in fat storing mode because there is insulin floating around. It’s pre-programmed to store fat. So, we are going to retrain your body to use fat as it’s main source of energy. Why would we do that? So that we can burn that fat!
To retrain your body, we use a low carb diet to restrict carbohydrates in your diet, which forces it to adapt to using fat as it’s fuel source.
If you don’t replenish the glucose, you’ll simply continue to burn fat. Your body is no longer in fat storing mode, in fact it’s in fat burning mode! Because there is no sugar coming in, your body doesn’t need to be pumping out all that insulin, and so you are not in fat storing mode any longer. This is a very efficient, safe, and fast way to lose weight, while allowing you to keep all your muscle. You don’t need to count calories or feel hungry – your body will naturally lose weight when you follow this way of eating. And, importantly, your muscle mass will be protected to help you keep burning fat.
So, eating a low carb diet will lead to fat burning pretty quickly. The other bonuses include:
- You are unlikely to feel hungry
- Cravings will be non-existent once your body has adapted to using fat as fuel
- The deadly fat on the inside of your tummy around your organs will go
- Your blood sugar levels will normalise, which is great news for diabetics
- Your cholesterol levels are likely to improve
- You won’t believe the delicious food you get to eat, and
- You’ll have so much more energy!
Want to know more?
Click here to get a list of which foods to eat and which to avoid on a low carb diet – FREE!
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