Hundreds of different diets claim to help weight loss – many are rather silly, and some even dangerous.  What is certainly true of most of them is that they seldom work in the long term. The most common is the low calorie diet.  This diet works on the idea that when you eat fewer calories than your body needs, it will begin to utilise stored fat for energy.  Put simply, if you eat more than you need you’ll get fat and if you eat less than you need you’ll burn stored energy off and lose weight. That, at least, is the theory.

But read what Patrick Holford wrote in his book ‘The Metabolic Diet’:-

“According to Dr Colgan, some of the athletes he works with burn off over 7,000 calories, but eat only 3,500 calories.  By calorie theory, these athletes should have disappeared completely by now.  An investigation by Dr Apfelbaum of people living in famine in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War shows the same contradiction.  With an average intake of 700-800 calories per day, and a daily requirement of say 2,500 calories, a deficit of 1,241,000 calories would build up over two years.  The average body has 30 pounds of fat, representing 100,000 calories, to dispose of.  Even if all this fat were lost, what happened to the remaining one million calories? 

“Since one pound of fat is roughly equivalent to 4,000 calories, eating 40,000 calories less per year would mean losing 10 lb in the first year, 3½ stone by the fifth year, over 7 stone by the tenth year and vanish entirely after 15 years!  All by eating one less apple every day.  Because one apple provides 100 calories a day or 36,500 a year.  Turn the equation round the other way, and the simple sin of an extra daily apple would mean a gain of 7 stone every ten years.”

Obviously therefore, calorie counting does not work, although it is true that the first couple of times you follow a low calorie diet you can lose weight initially.  However, if the body continues not to receive its expected ‘quota’, alarm bells will ring! Your body will go into emergency mode and quickly adjust its energy requirements to match the level of calorie intake.  It will only use up what it’s given, and weight loss discontinues. 

OK so far? Unfortunately, worse is yet to come for the unsuspecting habitual dieter!  The body, in its effort to survive long term, will store away fat reserves for a rainy day, by lowering its metabolic rate even further. From now on, you would need to lower your calorie intake even more in order to lose weight again.  In future, each time you starve your body, it will respond by lowering its metabolic rate until eventually you will gain weight even if you are on sparrow’s rations.

Sad to say, apart from the enlightened few, most medical doctors (and even some nutritionists) aren’t sympathetic to this plight and will often assume you are either not sticking to the diet, or are even a secret binger!  Often nothing could be further from the truth.  But here’s the good news. It doesn’t have to happen. The facts are simply that the real problem has not been addressed.