Diets are designed to fail!

I know that is a big statement, but I'm going to show you that going on a crash diet is not the way to a better looking you.

Let's have a look why:

To understand why this is true, you have to understand your body and how it works when it suddenly experiences a huge decrease in food.

Before the diet, your body becomes used to a certain level of calories to live on. These calories are basically made up of the calories in the food you take, less the calories your body burns throughout the day, whether it is from running its natural processes, or from any sort of exercise you do.

When you get on a diet, the body experiences a large decrease in calories. Initially your body does not react. That's why you will lose weight on any diet in the first few days and maybe even in the first week or so.

But your body is smart. It's a quick learner and adapts to the circumstances it faces. You see, your body was designed for a maximum efficiency.

For example, back, many thousand of years ago, when we were hunter/gathers, this was the key to survival. You may hunt down a big animal, be able to feast on it for a day or two, even a week, but then have nothing substantial for days on end while you went hunting for the next kill.

When your body finds itself deprived of nutrients for an extended period of time, it slows down the burning of the nutrients and calories that it does have. The rate at which your body burns calories is commonly called your metabolism rate.

The slower your metabolism rate, the slower your body burns the stored calories you have (including fat). As your metabolism rate decreases, your body is also able to utilize less of the calories you do take in, and store more of it as fat.

By having an extremely low metabolism rate, our forefathers were able to survive for days without eating. Their bodies were used to going into what's called 'survival mode'. That's when the body decreases the metabolism rate in response to a sudden decrease in calories. A low metabolism rate means your body releases stored calories at a slower rate, so your body can get more out of what you have already eaten.

So the lower your metabolism, the more calories you will store (including more fat cells), and the fewer calories you'll burn off, no matter what activity you do. You see, your body doesn't know the difference between dieting and starvation.

So, your metabolism starts to decrease. Now on this new diet, you initially experience weight loss. But your weight loss slows down eventually. Even though you might be eating less, your body adjusts to it. It stores fat at a quicker rate than before, because you're telling it that its not going to get as much food as it was used to.

If you continue to starve, your immune system becomes weakened. You experience nutritional deficiencies, and thousands of your body's natural processes start shutting down.

And to top it all off, when your body goes into starvation mode, it sends an alarm signal to eat. This is when you start getting cravings and the food you've been avoiding really becomes too tempting. You start wanting to eat everything in sight, especially calorie dense sugar and fat filled junk foods to get the energy that your body is craving for.

When you finally give in to your cravings, you start binging. Your body's calorie shoots up. But now your metabolism rate is much lower than it was before.

So now you put on fat even quicker than before. You could eat exactly what you ate before, and you will store more of it as fat, as compared to before. But what you're eating is a lot worse. So the fat comes back on twice as quickly as when you lost it.

So that's why no matter how hard you may have tried on a diet before, you probably failed. Its so common there's even a term for it --- the "yo-yo dieter".

I hope though you realized that it wasn't you that failed, it was set up to fail in the first place. So if diets aren't the answer - what is?

I highly recommend you go and get your hands on Tom Venuto's e-book "Burn The Fat". It will tell you exactly how you can avoid what I've just described here and he gives you more useful weight loss diet information.