Some people starve themselves to lose weight. They simply eat less of foods that have no place being in their bodies to begin with – foods that leaving them malnourished and unfulfilled no matter how much they eat.
If you’ve ever rooted around the fridge an hour after eating a huge bowl of pasta, you understand what I’m talking about. “Hmm, anything to eat in here? How old are these cold cuts, I wonder? Maybe I can just grab a spoon and some strawberry jam. Come on, there’s gotta be something!”
The hunger is a survival mechanism that you can't ignore long term When you eat nutrient-poor diet, your nutritional needs are not being met even though you may eat as much as you want – or more!. When you eat these same foods in limited quantities, by restricting caloric and fat intake, your nutritional needs become desperate drives for survival.
Beyond that, nutrient-poor foods also promote over-consumption, because they are addictive. Even when your diet contains enough nutrients to satisfy your needs, these foods create conditions in your brain that make you want more of them.
In nutrient-poor foods, the nutritional value is either stripped away, leaving only the pleasure-stimulating chemicals, or the food is over-concentrated, heightening the effect of those chemicals – or both. If you’re eating nutrient-poor foods, you’ll want more and more of them – regardless of your calorie intake.
Humans are not designed for dieting When someone “fails” to stay on a low-cal diet, it’s not a sign that they don’t have willpower, or that something is wrong with them. It’s an inevitable outcome of the way we’re wired – all of us.
And even for those who manage to “stick it out,” it’s a recipe for failure. MyTrainer expert advisor John McDougall, M.D., explains why:
The more you diet, the more efficient your body becomes at using food… the more you diet, the harder it becomes to lose weight.
Neal Barnard M.D., founder and president of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine, agrees:
In periods of food shortage the body slows down the metabolism to conserve energy. Just as a motorist who is running out of fuel tries to go easy on the accelerator and drive very smoothly to conserve gas, the body does the same sort of thing when food is in short supply. It turns down the metabolic flame to save as much of the fat on your body as possible until the starvation period is over… the more your food intake drops, the harder your body tries to keep from losing fat”.
Some of the people with the strongest willpower in the world are the most overweight.
Low-calorie diets do nothing but get you to eat proportionately less of the nutrient-poor foods that drove you to over-consume in the first place, turn down your fat burning ability, and drive you to binge when food is again available.
And nutrient-poor low-fat diets get you to eat the very same foods – with the fat stripped out and replaced with sugar or other chemicals.
People on most low-fat weight-loss programs are just as hungry or craving driven as people on most low-calorie diets, because they’re still eating nutrient-poor foods. And that’s what nutrient-poor foods do: make you hungry and unleash powerful addiction cycles in your body that drive you to eat to meet legitimate nutritive needs or to alleviate the discomforts of withdrawal.
Overweight is not about a lack of willpower When people who have tried low-calorie and low-fat diets experience feelings of guilt and shame about “falling off” their diets or “giving in to temptation” and cheating,” or gaining back all the weight they lost, and more, they’re being victimized by this diet trap in a profoundly personal way.
They’re equating an ability to live in a state of ever-increasing hunger and constant withdrawal with moral virtues like self-control and self-discipline. They’ve been encouraged to regard their inability to will themselves into slenderness as weakness by the people who sell them their diet books or the weight-loss centers to which they write their checks every week.
Search for the Diet Trap # 9 article:
The "They Look So Good on TV" Trap: comparing yourself to genetic freaks.
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