Dieting Can Be Adversely Affected By Not Eating Enough

In your efforts to lose weight do you greatly decrease the amounts of food you eat?  Do you only allow yourself to eat a small number of  low calorie food choices?  Do you steer away from your preferred foods due to the fact they are high in calories?  Does the main part of your diet consist of prepackaged diet foods?

If you answered yes to two or more of these question, you may be unintentionally impeding your attempts to lose weight.  Despite the fact that it seems to go against the grain, if you do not enough food your body will react as though it is starving,, and slow your efforts to reduce excess body fat.  If you limit your daily caloric intake to fewer than 800-1000 then your body will react as though it were starving, which it may well be.  Your basal metabolic rate can be reduced by as much as 25%; this will cause you to burn far fewer calories than you would have had you eaten just a little bit more.  Additionally, you may experience sluggishness and feel miserable.  This may cause you to succumb to temptation and end up on an eating binge.

Certain lifestyle changes will help you to cope and be able to overcome such a situation. To help prevent boredom that often occurs with bland, prepackaged diet foods, you should provide your taste buds some excitement.  By eating a spicy main course with some low fat side dishes, you may find a solution to this problem.


You should avoid skipping any meals.  Often times you may feel the need to skip breakfast.  However, this is ill-advised as eating a well-balanced breakfast will jump start your basal metabolic rate from the start of the day.  You may also find additional benefit from eating more often. Five smaller meals over the course of the day can be more useful when trying to lose weight than eating three larger meals.  Every time you eat, it causes your body to start the digestion process, which will cause you to burn more calories.  You will need to be certain that your five meals are smaller than you normally eat, or you will cause yourself to gain weight.  Furthermore, eating more often will also help you to feel less hungry.  Additional help in fighting cravings!

Stop yourself from giving in to cravings!  Cravings can destroy your dieting efforts.  If you have trouble with certain kinds of food, maybe you like pie, you should live without pie for twelve weeks.  After this episode of abstinence from pie, you will be in a better position to indulge in one small slice of pie without be tempted to eat a larger portion.  Plus, remembering your success in avoiding pie for twelve weeks will help you to only eat the one slice. Usually, dieters regain the weight they lose on their first attempt.  You can find the way to succeed if you do not give up, despite any set backs you may encounter.  A critical issue you need to face is learning and applying suitable techniques to help you in maintaining your new, healthy lifestyle.  A few of these are discussed in the Weight Loss Tips post.