What triggers you to start a diet? When a diet starts it can often be exciting and give you a sense of positivity. You may notice a quick drop of weight which is mostly water as your body uses glycogen stores first which uses 3-4 grams of water per gram of glycogen.
The sense of excitement then shifts to feelings of extreme hunger and annoyance when you notice others around you with greater food freedom as fad diets often have strict rules with extremely low calories. Also, feelings of frustration in the difficulty to maintain the diet. Often the outcome is overeating and a diet failure with more weight being put on than what you started with before starting your diet.
What causes these feelings and why is it that the brain works against you to lose weight quickly as is promoted on a fad diet? When you reduce the amount of food you eat the first thing you brain does is releases adrenaline. This is why you may feel a sense of excitement when you first start a diet. The reason for this is back in the caveman days when if you were hungry you needed to have energy to hunt and gather your food.
Secondly, there will be a drive to eat high calorie types of foods like sugar and fat which give your body lots of energy. Thirdly, your body will try to conserve its fat stores to help you survive the next period of hunger. Finally, when your body does start to eat it will reduce feelings of fullness and promote overeating to help you to store fat and survive the famine. Although this caveman situation is not accurate as you live in a modern world with endless opportunities to access fuel the brain still functions in a caveman way when starvation occurs.
This response of the caveman brain has been seen in diets which limit calories to 1500 a day. This amount is well above many of the fad diets trending. When you do stop a diet, your body is primed to store fat. So you end up with a higher fat percentage then when you started a diet. Fat burns less energy than muscle and is one of the reasons weight can increase above what it was when you started your diet.
Take home message: Work with an Accredited Practising Dietitian who can show you how to make lifestyle changes which stick. Promoting long term weight loss and health not a short-term fix with a greater weight rebound.
