low calorie appetizer recipes

If you are one of those people who think that starving yourself is a good way to lose weight, you are definitely going to want to read this. Most people think that if they are losing weight predominantly through caloric restrictions that by restricting more calories, you should be able to lose more weight. While that may sound like a logical approach to weight loss, it is very wrong. Here’s why……

First of all, understand that your body has evolved over the course of time to handle and cope with all sorts of possibilities and scenarios. One of these has to do with starvation. Now, in this day and age, if you live in modern world, chances are that you are far from starving. However, whenever you start to limit your caloric intake, alarm signals sound within your body. And the result is a series of things that will actually prevent you from losing the weight you want.

What constitutes a Starvation Diet?

First of all, to put what a starvation diet is, we have to set some parameters. In men, if you are eating less than 1800 calories and in women, less than 1,200 calories. You have to understand that your body needs a certain amount of calories per day in order to just function properly. When you go below this criteria, your body reacts and if you are trying to lose weight, you are basically working against thousands of years of evolution.

What happens when your body thinks it is starving itself?

Let’s take a look:

• Your metabolism starts to slow- What this essentially means is that you will need to do more to burn the same amount of calories that you burned before you decided to start your diet. From a scientific perspective, you stop releasing T3, a very important hormone that essentially regulates your metabolism.
• Less Leptin is released into your bloodstream- Leptin is another hormone stored in your fat cells. What leptin does is basically tell your body you aren’t starving. Obviously the less leptin released into your body, the more likely your body will think that you are starving.
• You start to lose muscle- Muscle burns calories and from your bodies perspective is the first thing you should lose (and the last thing YOU want to lose). What happens next is your body starts to use up your muscle for fuel. In other words, your body eats itself.

So now that we have asserted that a starvation diet in not good in overall weight loss, how can we improve our chances of losing weight? The answer is work with your body, not against it.

1. Find out how many calories you typically burn in a day- This can be done through various calculators online. Factors include age, gender, and activity levels.
2. Once you know how many calories you need, you will want to restrict caloric intake but not too much- Caloric restriction should not be more than 20% of your daily caloric requirements. In other words, if you have figured out you need 2,300 calories per day, you can restrict roughly 400 calories a day. This would be as simple as dropping a couple sodas out of your diet a day or jogging on the treadmill for 3 miles and would yield roughly a weight loss of about a pound a week.
3. You can also increase your activity to lose weight- I like food and therefore it is always easier for me to add a workout to my daily activity rather than drop food out of my diet. This can have the same effect as cutting calories in your diet.
4. Be Sure to add a cheat meal or if you are very active, a cheat day- Let’s be frank. Dieting stinks. The idea of eating salad at a restaurant while your buddy is eating a filet is not my idea of a good time. You are more likely to stay the course of a diet if you add a day or give yourself one meal a week where you can eat whatever you want. One cheat meal a week is not going to hurt your diet and you will be more likely to fall from your diet if you have one. Plus, you will shock your body from a “diet mindset”.

In conclusion, if you are restricting yourself to too few calories for your diet, chances are you aren’t going to lose the weight and more importantly, you won’t keep it off. However, if you start thinking of weight loss in terms of it being a marathon, not a sprint, you will likely be able to drop the weight permanently. Happy Dieting!

Leo Dimilo spent 6 years battling his weight by choosing one fad diet after another. While he was able to lose weight, he found the weight creeping back on. A year ago, he found the perfect diet….a lifestyle change and has managed to drop nearly 60 pounds in the course of a year.

Find Out How to Lose the Weight and Keep it Off PERMANENTLY!

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low calorie appetizer recipes