Easy Weight Loss Programs and Yo Yo Dieting

Posted by Wendy on April 29th, 2008 at 09:28pm

Yo-Yo dieters know who you are. You might go on an easy weight loss program in the fall in a burst of enthusiasm, lose 10 pounds by Thanksgiving and then gain it all back over the holidays. By New Year’s Day you weigh as much or even more than you did in September. You might try losing the same 10 pounds all over again, in time for swimsuit season, but this time the process is slower and you don t lose as much.

The Yo-Yo Dieting Syndrome generally refers to losing weight, regaining weight, then losing it again - repeatedly. Each time you diet it seems harder to drop the pounds. And when you regain weight, you seem to regain it more quickly. It doesn’t matter whether you are 10 to 15 pounds overweight or 30 to 40 pounds, the effect is the same.

The problem with repeated dieting is that, over the long run, it can wreak havoc on your body, not to mention the emotional frustration of repeated “failure.”

One thing yo-yoers have in common is that they often go on crash, fad diets in an effort to lose weight quickly. The term “yo-yoing” was coined in 1962 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore where a health physician was studying a particular patient struggling with repeated weight losses over a year’s time.

Why A Healthy Diet is Crucial To Long Term Success

Any time you go on a diet that’s nutritionally unsound - that is one that’s not well balanced and that has too few calories - your body thinks you’re starving it and therefore reacts by slowing your metabolism.

When you decide to stop dieting, your metabolic rate - the rate at which you burn calories - will not have recovered in time to handle the amount of food you’re again burdening it with. So you easily regain the weight you lost and sometimes even more.

Exacerbating the situation is loss of muscle tissue, or lean body mass. One of the most significant things contributing to a Yo-Yo Syndrome is that people diet in such a way that they don’t preserve lean body mass. They adopt a very low calorie diet with too little protein and then fail to exercise – a guaranteed way to lose crucial muscle tissue.

When the diet ends and they resume their old habits of eating high-fat foods and avoiding exercise, they regain lat, not muscle. Their weight may be the same as before they began dieting but the muscle-fat ratio has changed and they are literally fatter.

Repeated bad dieting leads to a progressive loss of muscle. The less muscle you have, the less active your metabolism and the fewer calories you burn. It is a sadly repetitious process familiar to too many people. So before you start on the next easy weight loss program, think about how your body works, and if the program supplies everything your body needs to stay healthy.

Tags: Easy Weight Loss, Healthy Diet, yo-yo dieting