You should be familiar with this question from those around you, “Why don’t you eat less?” Yes, I know, it’s frustrating. They do not understand that you are not going to lose weight simply by eating less. If it were that easy, a search on the term “weight loss” will not return tens of millions of results on Google. The common misconception is that to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you eat. However, this is not true. What actually happens when you eat less or lower your intake of calories or carb, your body goes into starvation mode. Thinking that you are starving, your body conserves whatever intake of calories and carb afraid that it might not get anymore. The result? All these are stored as fats, your body’s energy reserve. It simply uses less and stores more.

Now that will be opposite of your weight loss goals, storing and gaining instead of losing and burning more. You might notice some weight loss in the beginning of any form of starvation diet. These are usually water weight and god forbid muscle mass. It is not healthy to say the least. The healthiest way to lose weight is to burn fats and not lose muscle mass. When you are on any form of starvation diets, you will also notice a significant drop in your energy levels. This is because when your body is in starvation mode, your metabolism slows down. What this means is that your body burns less fat.

Having known all these, what you would ideally like to achieve is this: To feed your body sufficiently so that it doesn’t go into starvation mode, to maintain a high metabolism so that you burn most, if not all of your calories and carb intake. When this occurs, you will feel more energetic to go about your daily tasks, most importantly you do not feel deprived and hungry. The number one reason we cheat on or totally give up our diets.

You may be asking, how can you eat enough to satisfy your body and not feel hungry, and yet trigger your body’s fat burning hormones to burn off enough of your calories and carb intake to accomplish a weight loss? The trick lies in changing your calories intake at specific intervals keeping your body on its toes, shocking it to be at attention and actively burning fats. It does not know when will you be cutting the calories you are feeding it, therefore it burns as though you are having a high intake of calories. Just as it realizes that the intake has dropped and is thinking of switching to starvation mode, WHAM! Your intake goes back to normal levels. Your body will not know what hit it, just confused enough to keep on being a highly efficient fat burning machine!

To find out more about how you can keep your body on its toes, click on the link below: