Prevent The Yo-Yo Effect!
You’ve heard that rigorous diets don’t work, but you still think about starvation as a way to lose weight?
What you are telling your body is that there has been a difficult period in which you are not able to get food. And the body begins to fear how long such a period of scarcity can last.
Your body slows down the metabolism and starts consuming nutrients from all other reserves except fat reserves.
Fats are for the urgent situation and these reserves are used only when it comes to life and death. Your mood drops, you are in starvation mod and after a couple of weeks the body slowly begins to burn fat.
It all goes slowly and all the time you are in a bad mood, and your energy is at zero. In the end, you manage to lose weight and decide to reward yourself with a few good meals.
But beware of this, you are only telling the body that you have somehow managed to provide yourself with food. Now your body will take all the nutrients for itself and store them in reserves, fat reserves.
This is due to the fact that your body does not know if and when there will be another emergency situation. Well that’s the yo yo effect.
What Is Yo-Yo Diet?
Gaining back the hard-lost weight after dieting is perhaps the most painful of all factors influencing weight loss.
Why bother losing weight if all the body fat comes back within a few short months after you’ve reached your ideal weight?
And not only that but the weight tends to go up a bit HIGHER than what it was when you started dieting.
Eventually, you try again. Again, the weight goes down… only to come up again within a short period of time. Up and down the weight goes, just like a yo-yo.
It’s the most discouraging side of dieting.
You put in all that hard work to LOSE weight… and end up being HEAVIER a year later. Needless to say, the next attempt to lose weight is harder to start and there’s more to lose.
It’s fair to say that the yoyo dieting is the biggest enemy to weight loss.
Yo-Yo Effect Causes?
Well, the yo-yo effect is caused by a whole SET of factors but here are some of the most important ones:
Nutritionally Deficient Diets
It makes perfect sense. If the body is starved for its building materials DURING the diet it will take its own back once you relax the strict discipline on food when you’ve reached your ideal weight.
Again, the increased nutritional deficiencies create that “coiling-up effect” within the body during the diet.
The body craves those nutritional elements more and more… and your disciplined diet rebuts its desire. So it bides its time… and lashes back once you slacken the discipline.
And then, it will get its way… and you’ll have more cravings than ever before… and the weight starts coming back.
It’s not a question of giving the body less calories than it needs on daily basis. It can easily take those missing calories by converting body fat into energy which, of course, is the whole idea of dieting.
The question is whether or not you give the body the nutritional elements it needs, such as enough complete proteins, vitamins, minerals, water, and natural food in sufficient quantities.
If you do that and give the body ENOUGH NUTRIENTS while keeping the calories around 1,000 per day — a diet which will keep you satisfied and feeling full most of the time — you will greatly diminish the chances of the weight coming back immediately.
Starvation Diets
Starvation diets are certain to cause a very strong yo-yo effect once you ease off on the enormous self-discipline it takes to lose weight in this fashion.
These are called starvation diets because they contain less than 700 calories per day and consist of very limited foodstuffs. People have all kinds of ideas about dieting.
For instance, I know a person who lost 70 lbs. by eating two yogurts a day. That’s ALL he ate for several months!
No disrespect intended but that’s a diet that can KILL you. While definitely low on calories, this diet gives your digestive system NOTHING to work on and it certainly does not contain enough proteins, vitamins or minerals.
When I interviewed this man, he confessed to having severe dizzy spells several times a day during his dieting. In fact, he lost his consciousness several times a week for brief moments.
Of course, he also regained his weight in LESS time than it took to lose all those excess pounds of body fat!
Can you IMAGINE how starved his body must have been for NUTRITION?
Right. And after all that torture, he regained the weight back within less than six months!
Starvation diets, diets with strange and “un-food-like” foodstuffs and other crazy ideas like that will GUARANTEE that the body takes back the lost weight in a flash.
These diets are not only the most excruciatingly painful way of losing weight but also the most POINTLESS and DANGEROUS exercise in futility!
The Diet Contains No Stabilization Phase
You can have the perfect diet with just the right nutritional elements giving you a smooth ride to slimness and still put the weight back on in a year or two.
That’s UNLESS your diet includes a specific part that STABILIZES the nutrition for your body so that your weight is maintained at the level you want.
It takes a bit of time to stabilize the weight. And it is a very specific part of a successful diet as you’re really only looking to find an input-output ratio of energy that’s LEVEL.
It’s easier to LOSE weight simply because you don’t have to have such careful calculations but only need to ensure that you take in less energy/calories than what your body uses up.
But when you stabilize the situation, you have to find the exact level on which the body stays that same weight.
It’s not hard once you know how to do it. It only takes a few short weeks.
And the results are made PERMANENT.
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The Diet Has No Maintenance Phase
A good diet also includes a set time of MAINTAINING the ideal weight.
Here, basically, you need only to weigh yourself daily and have a quick remedy whenever the weight goes up (or too much down) so that it is stabilized back to the ideal.
A good maintenance phase lasts for six to twelve months. The idea is to learn to keep your weight at the ideal “automatically” so that you do it without putting any attention on it.
Similarly, you teach the body its new ideal weight so that it, too, will start maintaining that weight.
The maintenance phase is very easy. Basically you only weigh yourself daily and react to any change in weight. But for that you need the last and most important of tools in weight loss — knowledge.
Lack Of Knowledge
Let’s face it:
No matter how you lose weight, the only way to STAY SLIM is by KNOWING the basics of what your body needs to feel well, lose fat (and not muscle), stay level at your ideal weight… and what makes it gain weight.
This knowledge has to be learned in a way making it easy to use. Nobody can carry along scales and calorie tables with him or her.
Very few people want to study the equivalent of a university degree just to control their weight.
Instead, the knowledge has to be translated into simple and easy-to-use methods.
Knowing the basic foodstuffs which you need. Being able to determine by one LOOK how much you should buy and eat of each product.
Learning to FEEL when your body needs something and knowing when you’re gaining or losing weight… and so on. That’s knowledge in its most useful form.
How To Avoid The Yo-Yo Effect?
Aim your diet for permanent results. Know your enemy — the yo-yo effect — and be prepared to fight it when it comes to play after you’ve reached the ideal weight.
Plan your diet so that the strength of the yo-yo effect is minimal at the end of weight loss phase.
The more drastically you reduce your caloric intake the slower you will lose weight. That is why you need to be patient and realistic.
You should lose weight very slowly, say 1-2 lbs per week. Enter the minimum calories for your gender, age, height and weight. Divide the food into at least four or five meals.
If the same amount of food is divided into 5 meals, the metabolism will be significantly faster and you will lose weight faster.
Most obese people make mistakes and have only two meals a day. Also, there is a rule not to eat at least four hours before bedtime.
Only a diet without increased physical activity has no effect. Energy consumption needs to be stepped up. Start with some physical activity.
Walking, running, cycling and rollerblading will increase energy consumption and increase muscle mass as well.
When you get into the habit of exercising, then it will be easier to maintain the desired weight even after the diet.
If you do, this weight loss will be the easiest one you’ve ever had, regardless of whether or not you’ve experienced yo-yo dieting once or a dozen times before.
