One of the most devastating mistakes that people make when losing weight is following a low calorie diet.
Often when someone wants to lose weight, they reduce calories from their diet. But what happens if you don’t get the weight loss results you are looking for?
You may reduce your calories even more, and again, and again… Until you end up on a low calorie diet. So you may start off consuming 2500 calories, then 2000, then 1500, and then 1000 calories.
As an alternative, you may be so desperate to lose weight that you dramatically cut down your calorie intake and go straight to having a low calorie diet. For example, going straight from consuming 2500 calories to consuming 1000 calories.
What is a low calorie diet?
A low calorie diet can be defined as consuming less than 1200 calories per day for a woman, and consuming less than 1500 calories per day for a man.
What happens when you follow a low calorie diet?
When someone follows a low calorie diet, their body can go into what’s known as “Starvation mode”. Imagine that your body is struggling to survive because it’s being fed only a small amount of calories each day, like you’re a starving animal in the desert struggling to find food. Your body then adapts by trying to conserve as much energy (calories) as possible in order to keep you alive and survive.
“Starvation mode” is the reason why you can be on an extremely low calorie diet, yet still struggle to lose weight. Your body burns much fewer calories.
Several years ago, I helped a woman called Tamara who weighed 252 pounds. Before she came to me, she was following a strict diet every day of only 550 calories, BUT she couldn’t lose weight. How demoralising and devastating is this!
So as opposite as it may sound, you will find that consuming less and less calories is NOT better for losing weight. In fact, it’s usually much worse and makes losing weight much harder than it needs to be.
Other negative effects of following a low calorie diet
As well as making it harder to lose weight, following a low calorie diet can badly affect you in other ways.
You can be stuck in a very difficult position because how do you lose weight if you’ve already cut your calorie intake right down, and it’s not worked? Where do you go from there? You can only cut down your calories by so much and eventually there’s no room to cut down any more.
The only possible way out then, is to increase your calorie intake to try and get your body back to functioning normally. This takes some knowledge to get the right balance. It’s also very difficult to do mentally because you’ll be frightened of eating more and gaining more weight.
So weight wise it’s a very difficult position to be in. Plus, you will suffer these other drawbacks:
- Having less energy in general – Because your body is concentrating on survival due to having a small amount of calories, it means that your energy levels in general will be very low. This makes you feel drained all day which then affects your moods, makes you feel worse physically and mentally, and it affects all areas of your life
- Having less energy for exercise – Also with exercise, your body doesn’t have many calories to work with and you have no energy to exercise properly. On a low calorie diet, people rarely exercise because they simply can’t, or when they do try to exercise they feel terrible and it’s done at a very low quality level. Unfortunately, they then miss out on all the fantastic benefits of exercise
- Having more health problems – Then there’s the health side. If you follow a low calorie diet you have a much greater risk of suffering health problems like hair loss, reduced bone density and strength, skin and nail deterioration, or your menstruation cycle being affected or stopped
I hope you can see that simply cutting your calories down as low as possible in the hope to lose the most weight, or lose weight quicker, is NOT the way to go – Either for successful weight loss, or for your physical and mental health.
The good news is…
You NEVER need to follow a low calorie diet.
Doing so will only negatively affect you and your life. So let’s stay away from a low calorie diet!
To avoid mistakes like following a low calorie diet, and many other mistakes you could already be making which are making it harder for you to lose weight, take a look at BoostMyLife Online Program. It can save you much wasted time, effort, and anguish!
James Porter
BoostMyLife Founder
