It is a known fact that 3500 calories is a pound of body weight and to lose one pound, you must reduce your intake of calories (or burn off) by 3,500. Given that information, if you want to lose five pounds in one week, you must reduce your calories by 17,500!

But the thing is, the average person only takes in about 2000 calories a day, or 14,000 per week, and that is pretty much what it takes to sustain your health. In other words, to diet away five pounds in one week you can’t eat anything, ANYTHING, for the whole entire week, PLUS one day before AND one day after the week. An average daily food intake of 2000 calories would need nine days of zero, zip, nada, none, no food whatsoever to lose 5 pounds. The problem should be obvious at this point: You can’t just diet fat off. It takes more than diet.

When you cut out food, your body will throw all of it’s protein under the bus trying to protect itself. Without food, your body makes a bunch of decisions. (This is your body, not you. It’s a physiology thing.) After it takes all of the protein out of your muscle, (I’ll come back to body builders in a minute) your body will start to live on carbohydrates and when that happens you will gain weight! Your body will go into hibernation mode. You have to change the way your body works to make fat go away. It’s called METABOLISM. Your metabolism slows down and you won’t lose any weight, you’ll gain more.

If you wish to lose fat you’ll be better off if you work at increasing your metabolism rather than switching from one diet to another. Most diets work by creating a way for you to take in fewer calories than you need, and you’ll lose weight in the beginning. Then there will be a time when more weight loss will NOT happen because your body has adapted to that new level of calorie intake. You are in hibernation mode, your metabolism has recognized that the food supply is diminished, so it slows the burn rate. Think about bears that sleep through the entire winter, with their body living off the fat. No food comes in, and they survive for months. However, when they start eating again, their body immediately starts storing FAT all over again, getting ready for the next winter.

You have to control the burn rate, not the caloric intake. I mentioned body builders a minute ago. They eat like they will never have another meal. For all the food they take in, they should weight 400 pounds, but they don’t. They have learned to speed up their metabolism, so what they eat is going into muscle building, not fat storing.

One thing is for sure: Body Builders don’t eat a lot of Big Macs and Whoppers. They have a totally different diet, and couple with some simple exercises, they control their metabolisms. If you like that sort of look, they are usually pretty hot, too.

The real deal is, you can’t just diet and make fat go away, so you have to make a choice, a complete lifestyle choice. You want to lose weight? Start with a little exercise. Get your metabolism kicked up. Once it starts to take off a little weight, THEN start your diet. After that, up your exercise. If you wait to start until you have increased your metabolism, all your work will be more effective. The pounds will come off faster and more easily. The weight loss is more likely to be permanent.

See, I’m not here trying to sell you a product. I want to talk about what will be good for you. You need to wrap your head around the fact that you put your weight on because you don’t burn everything that you eat. You store some of it, and over time, that weight becomes your weight. Problem is, storage is driven by consumption, and consumption is mostly about water. Protein is 75% water, and body builders have protein drinks, bars, and so on. When you go on a diet, after you clear out the water you burn protein from your storehouse.

You can’t just diet fat off because your body will give away all of it’s protein to protect itself, so you start to live on carbohydrates- and gain weight. When you lower your food intake, you lose protein, and this loss lowers your burn rate.

I’ll bet your body answers differently than you do!

If you have tried several times to lose weight, and it doesn’t seem to work as well as before, you might have a very different problem than you think.

Have you ever heard of hibernation mode? When a bear stores up fat for the winter, his body goes into a hibernation mode. It stops burning that fat at the normal rate. The bear’s metabolism says,”Hey, remember the last time when the food stopped coming for a couple months? It looks like that’s going to happen again. If there is going to be a food shortage for the next couple months, I won’t burn the calories.” The bear has a built-in system for not losing weight based on the food supply called the hibernation mode.

So do you.

This is a physiological instinct. It is as natural in your own body, or the bear’s, as a heartbeat. You can’t dictate to it or control it any more than you can make your heart change rhythm.

Here is what happens in a person.

When you decide to go on a diet for the very first time, your body doesn’t realize that this will be a temporary suspension of intake, so it just keeps on burning the calories at the normal rate which leads to a great weight loss. You slim right down, and everything is terrific. That happens the first time.

The problem is, and I’m sure you will recognize it, that as you lose whatever weight you wanted to take off and are very happy with the results, your body is asking what happened to the food supply. It starts to say “When the food comes back I’m going to have to store some of it, just in case this happens again.”

You are happy. So happy, in fact, that once you have achieved your weight loss goal, you revert to the same eating and exercise habits that led to the diet in the first place. You don’t know that your body is making plans to keep some extra weight in case it needs it in the future.

Then, after a while you look in the mirror and realize you put all the weight back on. You go back to that great diet that helped you lose all that weight, but something different happens this time: the weight doesn’t melt off.

Why?

Your body has activated the hibernation mode. Just like the bear going into the winter, your body recognizes that the food supply has just shut down so it takes an animal instinct function of “winterizing” the metabolism. “Hey, there’s no food coming in again! I remember this! It must be hibernation time! I won’t burn the calories.”

That is not a choice that you consciously make, it’s an animal reaction. Your body’s physiology accepts the food cutoff and responds to it. The diet takes longer and longer to get the job done, but eventually you reach your goal weight, and go off the diet and back to your old ways. You start piling on the pounds faster now, because your body, again, is making a survival decision: fatten up, because there will be more of these winter periods, and they may get a lot longer. You get into the well known “yo-yo” pattern: put a little on and fight to get it off, then put more on, then take that off, and over and over and over.

There you have it. The whole problem.

If you go on a diet with the intention of it being a quick fix for your weight situation, you have to be aware that part of your brain is not going to co-operate. It won’t let you lose weight time after time on the same plan.

Weight loss is truly not about a short term change in your food intake. Weight loss is about long term change in your self-destructive patterns (bad habits). If you eat too much for your body to burn, you will get fat. 3500 calories is a pound. You can’t change that. If you eat that much in one day, you have to burn that much to stay even. If you only burn 2500 calories but take in 3500, that extra 1000 calories a day will be an extra pound of weight in three and a half days.

However, if your body sees the food supply shutting down it will tell your metabolism to burn calories more slowly, so you may only use 1500 calories the next day instead of 2500. Instead of losing weight, because your body doesn’t want to let you starve, you may go on a diet and gain weight.

In truth, the only way you can control weight loss is to study your own habits that are leading to weight gain and change them. That means food intake, diet, and exercise. Ugh, exercise! You know, like when you go to the gym and work out, and then stop on the way home for an ice cream. Your mind is thinking about losing weight, but your body is saying that you deserve the ice cream for having worked out, but actually your body is tricking you into adding more calories so it can keep itself going.

However, cravings and exercise are topics for other articles.