Sunday, November 3, 2013

Rapid Weight Loss Sucks - Why Losing Weight Fast Doesn't Work and What You Can Do About It

Everywhere you look today people are offering a rapid weightloss solution. Products and plans are springing up everywhere preying on the pain and the frustration of people who've been struggling with their weight. These programs guarantee that not only can you lose weight but you can also lose it quickly and if you're in pain obviously you want out of the pain as quickly as possible. Unfortunately rapid weightloss products and programs don't work and if you use them you're more likely to end up heavier and more frustrated than when you started. Here's why.Homoeostasis is a mechanism within our nervous system designed to maintain our body in a certain healthy state. Our body temperature for example is maintained automatically without any conscious thought or concern on our part. In humans normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature must be maintained in order for us to survive. If the temperature varies too much our health is severely compromised.  And just as our nervous system is responsible for keeping our body temperature at a certain level, our heart rate at a certain level and our blood pressure at a  certain level, it's also are responsible for maintaining our body weight at a certain level.Now obviously we have a lot more conscious control over our body weight than our body temperature and we can make changes, the problem occurs when we try to make the changes to quickly and to dramatically. When you use a rapid weightloss method and try losing weight too fast, our nervous system perceives that as a threat and attempts to regain balance and return us to our normal body weight.When we talk about our "normal" body weight in this context we're not talking about healthy body weight necessarily but rather the body weight that we have conditioned our nervous system to accept as normal. So in this context, 50 pounds overweight, if that is weight has been maintained a good length of time, has now become the normal mark and any attempt to change it too quickly will be resisted.Now it's relatively easy, especially if you are very overweight, to lose weight quickly. If you are 50 pounds overweight for example and make radical changes to your diet and exercise you can lose a significant amount of weight very fast.The problem is the rebound effect within the nervous system that will pull the pounds back on just as quickly as they were lost. Unfortunately, in addition to putting on the weight you have lost, in many cases, a "safety buffer" gets added as a form of insurance just in case the weight drops dramatically again. Put simply, the faster you lose the weight the more likely you are to end up heavier than when you started.Really the only time that a  rapid weight loss program should be used is when there is an immediate health threat that requires weight to be lost as quickly as possible. Other than that the quickest way to lose weight is to lose it slowly. The first thing that needs to change is your thinking about your weight, about your desperate need to lose weight fast. If you have been overweight for an extended period of time, what does it matter if it takes a while to lose the weight?If you use a weight loss approach that starts slowly and allows the body to adapt and not fight your efforts to lose weight you find that the momentum of your weight loss will increase. So by  starting slowly and not shocking your nervous system into resisting your weight loss efforts, it quickly comes on board and will begin to actually help you lose weight more quickly.At the end of the day the only rapid weight loss solution that works is one that takes its time and works with the body rather than against it. If you lose weight in this way there is a very good chance that you'll never have to lose it again and that has to be worth taking your time.