Diets Don’t Work: The Science Behind The Failure

Dieting is an issue that affects millions of people worldwide. In fact I bet there’s not one person reading this that doesn’t know somebody who’s currently on a diet or has been on one in the past. I can also bet that everybody reading knows of somebody who’s been dieting for most their life, the reason for this; diets don’t work! This isn’t just an opinion; it’s backed up with strong scientific evidence and a reasoning that makes perfect sense.  The idea of this article is to educate people as to why diets are completely and utterly detrimental to their fat loss goals.

First of all it is important to define exactly what a diet is. If you’re on a diet, it implies that you are undergoing a period of time where you consume a harshly low amount of calories, normally with the intentions of losing body fat. So by definition, diets are temporary. This is the first major problem. Weight that is lost from dieting is almost always put back on when the diet has ceased. This process is known as yo-yo dieting and there will be a separate article explaining exactly what this term refers to. For now I’m going to look at the reasons why diets fail.

When people diet they make the obvious mistake of drastically reducing their calorie intake, hoping this will result in the loss of body fat. Essentially people starve themselves to lose fat. This will not work. You might be sitting there, having done this yourself, and disagree with me as you managed to lose weight when you tried this approach in the past; and I’m not going to call you a liar and deny you lost weight. Anytime you restrict your calorie intake you will lose weight BUT the majority of that weight loss will not come from fat. So if your only criterion for success is weight loss, and you don’t care whether that comes from fat or muscle then by all means starve yourself to ‘success’. However if fat loss is your goal, and it should be for a number of health related reasons, then it’s time to wise up to diets and realise they are not right for you. The Science:

The Human Body is Too Clever: over millions of years the human body has evolved to cope with times where there have been shortages of food, leading to a reduction in calorie consumption. When your body senses a shortage of calories, it enters the aptly named ‘Starvation Mode’ to prevent you from living off all your reserves and effectively eating yourself to death. The big problem for dieters is that your body assumes that dieting is starvation, it cannot tell the difference. When your body enters starvation mode is elicits a starvation response. The only way you can prevent your body from entering starvation mode is to avoid a drastic reduction in calories, i.e. avoid dieting.

Consequences of Starvation Mode: So we’ve established that drastic dieting will force your body to go into a starvation response, and you will only need to reduce your calorific intake by 20% a day for this to happen. For the average woman this means a reduction of 400-500kcal a day and a total intake of roughly <1400kcal. Not that much of a reduction is it? Now it should be clear why so many people suffer from this. Essentially the problem with a drastic reduction in calorie intake and subsequent starvation response lies with the consequent effect on your metabolism. When calories are cut the body will accommodate for this by slowing down its metabolism (via decreased activity of thyroid hormone T3). So, if you eat less, your body will burn less. In some cases resting metabolism has been shown to slow by up to 40% when there is a severe calorie restriction. This is the reason why it becomes increasingly more difficult to lose weight on a diet. You will get that 2-week period where weight seems to be dropping off you, but this will slow as your metabolism slows until you can almost eat nothing and still find it impossible to lose weight.  Sound familiar? If you truly want to lose body fat you have to increase your metabolism, and if you truly want to do that you have to eat more. The more you eat, the more you burn.

Further to the slowing of your metabolism, your body will want to store any fat it consumes and burn the muscle. ‘Why would your body do this?’ Well 1g of fat contains roughly 9kcal of energy, 1g of muscle contains roughly 4kcal. If your body is in starvation mode and assumes that not enough energy will come from the diet, it will store the most energy rich substrate available, this happens to be fat. At this point your body is storing the fat and what little weight you are losing is coming from your lean muscle mass, still sound like a good idea?

As well as the above there is another unhelpful consequence of the starvation response. Your body uses a massive number of enzymes in the body, all of which catalyse different reactions. The main enzyme involved in the fat storage is LPL (lipoprotein lipase). When your body elicits a starvation response, the activity of LPL is greatly increased. This in turn causes the action of fat burning enzymes to decrease. Adding further explanation to the increased storage of body fat when people diet. You may end up weighing less, but you will have an increased body fat percentage. I know which one I’d rather.

So if you want to lose body fat, and keep it off, you have to give up dieting and ultimately accept that the whole concept is fatally flawed. However there are ways to burn body fat and keep it that way… this series of articles will cover the methods and help you burn fat safely and effectively, and reach the goals you want.

If your still not convinced then answer me this, why do cases of obesity continue to rise when there are more diet programs in use now than ever before?

Sam @GBNutrition

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