In Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work Part 1, I told you about Margaret and her efforts to lose weight quickly and without exercising. Here are the facts about low-fat low-cal diets - too late for Margaret, sadly…

1. Food is fuel to your body. Your brain gets nourished first, then your organs, then the rest of you. A certain amount of fuel is needed just to keep everything “ticking over”. This varies from person to person, but is roughly 1000 – 1200 calories per day. That’s before you get out of bed and start moving around.
    
2. Protein (meat, fish, eggs, nuts, soya) is used for repairing the body and building muscle. Your body can function on a mainly-protein diet, but it is not the preferred fuel and has side-effects (see section on High-Protein Diets).
    
3. Carbohydrates (rice, pasta, cereals, potatoes, bread, veg, fruit) are the fuel that powers the engine. Without sufficient carbs in the diet, your body starts to self-cannibalise and break down muscle tissue for fuel. Muscle tissue is the body’s furnace; the less muscle you have, the fewer calories you burn and the weaker and more lethargic you feel.
    
4. Fats are an essential part of a healthy diet – in small quantities and preferably from such sources as nuts, oily fish and unsaturated oil such as olive oil. Some fat is necessary for vitamins A, D, E and K to be absorbed into the body.
    
5. By the second week of a low-fat low-cal diet, your body has decided there is obviously a famine and goes into meltdown! Excesses of a natural enzyme are produced to make fat storage super-efficient, as fat stores are what will keep you alive in the long run.

From this, you can see that the low-fat low-cal diet has had the opposite effect to the one you wanted. You have become a Slow-Metabolism Fat-Storing Machine that is nervy, irritable, feels sick and can’t sleep! Worse (if anything could be worse), even when you start eating properly again, your fat-storing remains super-efficient, and your metabolism sluggish (no muscle, remember?) so the weight simply piles back on – more than before. Your body will not be fooled again to shed so much weight so quickly, so subsequent “quick” diet attempts make the situation worse – and you have the Yo –Yo effect.

Once in this situation, it’s mighty hard to get out of it. But it can be done. By giving up the “quick fix” idea for ever, and accepting that change takes time and that it’s time for change, you can persuade your body to trust you again. Remember; if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. In this case, fat and miserable! Eat small portions of healthy, quality food regularly and set aside some time every day to get some exercise, and within a month you’ll start to see results. And you’ll feel so much better that you won’t believe it!

Carol J Bartram

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Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work - Part 2