Why Diet's Backfire

It is easy to see how diets wreck our metabolism. Any diet that tries to cut back drastically on anything from calories to carbs is doomed from the start because it doesn't work with how the human body works. It seems logical: eat less, burn more, lose weight, but the only true way to lose weights is to burn more calories per day than we eat. Our body's natural instinct isn't to keep reviving your metabolism once your food intake goes down because not long after you start depriving your body, it is going to lower your metabolism to match the food coming in. This explains why we are successful the first few weeks of a diet and then even though you continue to stick to the diet, the weight loss stops and although you eat like a bird, no more is lost.

Diets also can cause you to feel sluggish, depressed, cravings for "real food" which leads to sneaking forbidden foods and slipping off the diet and then the weight comes back with a vengeance and you end up bigger than you were to start with. Diets can also imprison you and cause you to resent them which in the end, causes you to stop dieting.

A slow metabolism also causes you to lose muscle, which is what is needed to burn more calories. The more lean muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even while sleeping!

When you go on a diet, you have to go off it and the more you go on and off, the more messed up your metabolism becomes. The key is to fix our metabolism and make lifetime changes that we can live with forever, not temporary ones. Temporary diet = temporary loss.

The good news is that there are plenty of things you can do to fix your metabolism. After over 30 years of messing mine up, I was able to get mine working well in 5 months and high functioning in about 18 months. Here are 5 ways to boost that metabolism:

1. EXERCISE (get that heart rate up for at least 30 minutes a day)

2. EAT BREAKFAST (don't skip any meals, especially breakfast!)

3. DRINK WATER (1/2 your body weight in ounces)

4. SLEEP WELL (get your 8 hours!)

5. STAY ACTIVE (you can burn an extra 350 calories a day by doing this. Take the stairs, park far from the store, walk and move as much as you can)