Going on a low calorie diet slows down your entire body metabolism. It makes it progressively difficult to obtaining weight loss. There is high ratio of failure versus success but still, people continue to try one diet regimen after another hoping that one may be worth the risk.

Combination of hormonal changes is a factor why dieting fails to some point. Aside from this, frustration is also a big deal. Your body's natural response to shortage of calories is to conserve fat. This is actually beneficial for your ancestors trying to survive a shortage on food years ago.

When a person undergoing a diet persists longer with self-imposed starvation, the body starts to break muscle tissues down for fuel. When this happens, the protein releases nitrogen which your body will quickly wash away by emission of water from the tissue cells. This causes an instant decrease in water weight and an eminent weight loss. On the other hand, muscle and water loss is nothing to be happy about. As soon as you have something to drink, water weight will be easily regained and the muscle you lost may cause havoc on your body metabolism for a long period of time.

Our muscles are metabolically active tissues. They have a need for a certain amount of calories every day to maintain themselves. As a result, you burn more calories the more muscles you comprise. When your body breaks down muscle, your need for calories lessen as well. Now with those muscles gone, you will have lesser amount of calorie requirement for a day and that will make your weight loss maintenance even harder.

Nevertheless, we are all aware that most dieters will not be able to keep the starvation habit for long. They will ultimately go back to their usual eating habits. If this happens, the weight unavoidably comes piling back in. Since they lost muscle and fat during the diet, the sad thing is they only put back fat. Therefore, although they weight the same as when they started with the diet, they now have more fat than muscle. It will mean that they have slower metabolism and less calorie requirement which will make them susceptible to gaining weight more and more.

An active lifestyle is the only solution to this problem. Have yourself do aerobic exercises, a healthy diet, and a solid weight training program. A healthy diet will keep your metabolism in its peak with around 4 to 5 meals a day. Base your diet around fresh fruits and vegetables plus lean protein and whole grains. No off-limit foods but avoid sweets and junk food or just take them in small quantities. A healthy diet is permanent and much more realistic. It is not something that you engage with in a week or two and quit while you are at it.