Why So Many Regain Weight After Fast Weight Loss

Losing weight to any significant degree is often something we need to face more than once in our lives. It’s a serious problem. We go through all the time, effort and struggle of losing the weight, only to watch it creep back on again until we’re right back where we started – or worse!

Research shows that when people lose weight quickly, their odds of regaining the weight are even higher. This isn’t exactly encouraging when it’s such a difficult process in the first place. It takes a genuine psychological toll. Why should we go through it all if it’s only temporary? Why battle with the hunger, sweat through the workouts and pay a fortune to replace a wardrobe if the next few years will only put us back to the beginning again? It leads to feelings of failure, shame, low self esteem and guilt.

The key to avoiding these consequences and stopping this pattern is to understand why the weight comes back in the first place. By knowing this, you can arm yourself against it and make sure you are ready to keep those pounds off for good.

• Fast weight loss – If you follow a fad diet or use a product that promises you an excessive amount of weight loss within a tiny amount of time, it may seem fantastic as you watch the numbers plummet on the scale, but all of a sudden, you’ll watch them all coming back on again. There are many reasons that this can happen. The first is that you’re likely losing more than just body fat. In fact, most of what you’re likely losing is not body fat. Very fast diets typically cause you to lose mostly water, some muscle and a bit of fat. Once you hydrate yourself again, the water comes back, plus you’ll be more likely to gain fat faster than before because your muscle mass will have been depleted. Skip the rapid dieting and adopt a long term healthy lifestyle instead.

• Cookie cutter dieting – You followed a strict diet your cousin used and you’ve lost some weight but it didn’t last and the pounds came back. What happened? The odds are that despite your cousin’s success, her long term weight management needs are different from yours. We all have different bodies, lifestyles, preferences, weaknesses and strengths. Just because something works for one person, doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. There is no single diet that works for all people. The key is to find the right one for you.

• Starvation dieting – Depriving yourself of the foods you love or of too many calories isn’t something you can maintain over the long term. If your strategy isn’t compatible with the long term, it means you’re aiming for only short term, which only sets you up for the weight to come back.