WHY SUPER LOW-CALORIE DIETS DON’T WORK.

The key to losing weight is to be in a calorie deficit – so essentially eating less and moving more. Does that mean you should eat as little as possible? No. You’ll be constantly hungry, you’ll risk cheating on your diet, your energy levels will decrease, your intensity during your workouts will decrease and your likelihood of building muscle will also be decreasing. So that is why we don’t want to stay down too low for too long.

As we start to bring our calories down, our body starts to down-regulate and it’s going to start to pull away the processes in the body it doesn’t necessarily need to operate at full force constantly.

Think of your body as your phone. When your phone is on low-power mode, what your phone is doing is turning down the background activity in the app and it uses less power by down regulating the amount of power needed. Your body does the same. So imagine, when the amount of energy coming in starts to become restrictive, your body will switch off all of it’s non-necessary background processes and start to down regulate everything.

So, what you need to do is recharge. That means bringing the energy coming in back up in order to bring your phone back out of low-power mode. Your body will do the same. It will switch itself back out of low-power mode and it will start to off-regulate everything and therefore you start to burn more calories as the processes start to improve.

What we need to do is to find the right balance between optimal performance, optimal training output, whilst remaining in a good enough deficit to lose fat and keep that consistent. If you lose too many calories, you are compromising performance. If you don’t take away enough calories you are compromising fat loss. We are trying to find the balance between the two.

When being on a low-calorie diet, it is important to understand that just because your calories are low, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are malnourished or that it is a dangerous place to be. Your body is going to ask for nutrients more than calories so when you are dieting low-calorie, you need to make sure you are still well nourished – that’s why it is important to eat high-quality proteins, plenty of vegetables and to eat a few pieces of fruit everyday because as long as you have those nutrients in your system, you are not going to be starving hungry and you’re not going to be really struggling to diet. The reason why people struggle to diet is because they tend to restrict their food choices. In order to maintain proper health and a fully nourished body it is important to vary the sources that you are consuming. If you are not doing that, then you are going to suffer.