Reason Why It’s Hard to Lose Weight
December 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Are you sick and tired of your love handles, fat gut and jiggling arms? One of the worst things anyone can do is to crash diet in order to lose weight. When you crash diet, you’re actually losing some pounds for a month or two before progress falls to the ground. Eventually, you will gain back all the weight you lost and plus more.
Why is weight loss so difficult?
Your body is very efficient at storing and preserving energy. So, this means your body works double time in order to burn the smallest amount of energy —even when you’re on a crash diet program. Crash dieting affects your hypothalamus which is within in the lower part of your brain, controls your appetite, satisfaction of hunger and even your metabolic rate.
Research
Dieting, often referred to as caloric restriction, causes your stomach to set off a chemical called Ghrelin, which activates fat metabolism, free radical formation, and boosting activity of uncoupling proteins in the cells of the hypothalamus, which causes hunger. Researchers from Yale and Rockefeller universities, led by Zane Andrews, has concluded that the difficult way that the body controls food consumption and metabolic rate.
The chemical release of Ghrelin process triggers a different energy control pathways within our brain that causes us to increase food intake and slow metabolic rate. This is the reason why many people plateau and stop losing weight on a diet and exercise program, even though they are not eat as much and burning more calories than they did prior to starting their diet program. Researchers have concluded that eating food that has antioxidants might be a way to regulating our hunger and weight loss.
Source: Nature, 454:846-851, 2008
