Determination to Lose Weight

This is how your brain fights against your determination to lose weight.

Have you heard about the “rebound effect” when you diet? Do you want to know why that “miraculous” diet has no effect on you? Well, the answer is simple, your brain fights against your determination to lose weight all the time.

No, it’s not like you have a brain programmed for obesity. But the brain controls all the vital functions of your body and what matters most is keeping everything under control.

To put it another way, the brain does not like big changes, because it understands that they are a problem. Speaking of diet, if you start losing a lot of calories at once, your mind will believe that something is wrong, maybe there is a shortage problem outside and you have to solve it.

How does the brain try to accommodate that problem? Well in some ways that will surprise you.

Feeling more hungry when your diet is a brain response

Let’s take an example. You have started a fairly restrictive diet, but according to which you should not go hungry. However, on the third day, you can only think of food. At the fifth, maybe you see people walking by in the shape of a chicken.

Has it happened to you? Well it’s normal, and it does not have to do with the diet “makes you go hungry” (although many do). Is that the brain has a set point about weight, which seems healthy. As it is not infallible, it may be that this point is above your ideal weight.

Simply, it is the point of comfort. Where your brain has found itself at ease, and where it seems that everything is fine. If you start reducing your calories from one day to the next, the brain will become defensive. Something is wrong, according to his criteria: it is not normal to lose so much weight in such a short time.

Then, it produces a defense mechanism: it reduces the levels of leptin, the hormone that makes us feel full. That is to say: we are hungrier.

Of course, everything is in your brain and your hormones, but hunger is real. That’s why restrictive diets, in which you promise to lose a lot of weight in a few days, are not really efficient.

But there is still more.

The brain also takes care of energy

your brain fights against your determination to lose weight

Our body spends calories all the time. Just being alive means spending energy. Although we burn calories even when we sleep, during the day it is when we use more energy.

All the energy that we use outside the hours of sleep, and without counting the time we do exercise itself (such as going to the gym), has the name of thermogenesis not caused by exercise (TNCE).

Put simply, it is all the calories we burn in everyday activities, from the smallest to the most important. Go to the kitchen to look for water, open the door to the dog, make the bed, climb the stairs, etc. Even being “restless” (sitting but moving in the chair) burns calories.

Well, when we lose weight drastically for a diet, another defense mechanism of the brain is to reduce your TNCE. The incredible thing about this is that you may not even realize it. But surely, you will get up fewer times to open the dog, maybe you will not make the bed, or until you are less restless.

Yes, the brain thus takes care of your energy, and therefore, many of the calories that you “lost” with the diet you recovered by doing a little less daily movement. It does not seem very encouraging, right?

There is a solution

your brain fights against your determination to lose weight

Yes, there is a solution to all this. But I’ll give you a preview: maybe you do not like listening to it.

Well, the solution for your brain is not the one that most fights against your determination to lose weight are the following: choose to lose weight slowly but steadily. Yes, boring. But true.

You have to think about it this way. Your brain is not a big boycott, it does not want you to look good. He only takes care that the body stays healthy, and does not consider that to lose many kilos in a few days is the way.

Pay attention to him. Take care of your body and see little by little. Start eating fruits and vegetables, unrefined grains and lots of protein. Instead of setting your goal to “lose 5 kilos in a month,” set a goal of “eating vegetables at all meals for a month.”

Maybe you lose up to 5 kilos, but if you only lose 1, it does not matter. It is constant, healthy, and your brain will accompany you in the process.

What do you think? Often your brain fights against your determination to lose weight.