Reasons to avoid low-calorie diets
1. Diets increase hunger and cravings.
Have you ever started a diet to lose weight fast, and all you thought about was food and how hungry you were? Eating too low or restrictive diet plans can set you up for binging and are not sustainable for lasting results.
2. Diets slow your metabolic rate.
This is not what you to want when you are trying to change your body and lose fat; you want to keep muscle and speed up your metabolism. Your body will match the energy you put into it, so if you give it little, it will burn little and hang onto all the extra fat you are trying to lose.
3. Diets increase your risk of losing muscle.
When you are on a low-calorie diet, your body looks for ways to preserve energy. So it will take it from your own body, and one place it will take is your muscle. This is not what you want if you are trying to burn fat and build muscle. I think women can get confused about weight loss versus fat loss. Weight loss is just weight on the scale going down; that doesn’t mean you are losing fat. You can lose muscle and lose weight, you can lose water and lose weight, and you could cut off a limb and lose weight.
Fat loss, you need to eat enough to keep your muscle and train hard to keep building the muscle and have energy. A lot harder mentally because it takes patience and consistency.
4. Diets decrease your NEAT Burner.
NEAT: non-exercise activity thermogenesis. It’s the scientific name for all your physical activity throughout the day, excluding your actual workout. All those errands, chores and yard work actually speed up this process, but this decreases when you are On a to low-calorie diet.
5. Diets decrease your energy and work capacity.
Ok, we need our energy, girls!! We can’t afford to run low on energy. But unfortunately, food is energy, and when we decrease it, we decrease our energy for workouts and our brain energy for work , thinking, creating and most importantly, our mental health.
6. Diets decrease your thyroid function
Your thyroid plays a vital role in making all your hormones work properly, and if this is out of wack, your whole system will be. Your thyroid is like a thermostat for your whole body.
I have Hypothyroidism and have to take meds for this, and if I don’t take them, I can’t even function. Trust me; you don’t want to mess with this. A good functioning thyroid means a happy, healthy body and brain.
7. Diets decrease the hormone leptin.
Again it affects another hormone, and girls, we don’t want to mess with our hormones. Leptin plays an important role in regulating our metabolism and body weight. When you are well-fed, your body fat levels are stable. But if food levels decrease too much, so does leptin, and then your body sends a signal to store fat instead of release it.
8. Diets increase the stress hormone cortisol.
Now, girls, I’m sure you’ve heard about this hormone; It’s the belly fat area we gain when we get stressed.
Our adrenal glands produce cortisol, the more cortisol your adrenals release and make it really hard to lose any weight, never mind fat. If this happens for too long, it can lead to adrenal fatigue, and this is not fun girls; this is called extreme burn out.
9. Diets increase your chance of weight gain, and more than before.
Almost everyone that’s lost weight on a low-calorie diet has gained back more than they started with. This is because it’s not sustainable, and as soon as you go off, your body hangs on to everything because it’s not sure if you’re going to starve yourself again. So everything you eat gets stored as fat in case you threaten it with starving it again.
Your body cannot tell the difference between starvation and low calorie, it just can’t.
10. Diets increase anxiety & depression.
Your brain needs a minimum of 130 grams of carbs a day to produce serotonin. This is the happy chemical. If you drop too low, your brain can’t produce it.
I know for me besides not getting enough food there’s the anxiety of eating the wrong thing or gaining weight and then feeling depressed because you ate something you shouldn’t have. This is not healthy and leads to many disorders.
Lastly, diets can increase the chances for eating disorders, body dysmorphia and an unhealthy relationship with food.
Well, girls, I hope this has helped give you clarity on why a low-calorie diet doesn’t work.
I encourage you to learn about food, eat the foods you like within your macros, lift your heart out and love yourself through the process!
FCB team.