Low Calorie Snacks Why They’re Not All They’re Cracked Up To Be
Friday, July 29th, 2011
If you’re looking for low calorie snacks, congratulations! It means that you’re taking a healthy step in watching your health and making sure that you don’t overeat.
Be warned, though… eating consistently low calorie will hurt your weight loss efforts. Don’t feel bad for not knowing this: a lot of people don’t understand how low calorie or starvation can actually hinder your weight loss efforts (or make you stay the same… or in worst case scenario, gain weight).
When you eat a low calorie diet, in the beginning, there’s a deficit of calories that you’re taking in versus what you’re eating. You naturally lose weight.
However, the way that your body is designed is to protect you. After a while, it will go into “starvation mode” because it will think that you were in some sort of famine. It’ll think that you’re not going to feed it any more calories, so it will hold on to any calories that it can get access to, for dear life.
When this happens, your fat burning hormones get demolished. Your fat cells release leptin, which is an anti-starvation hormone, and it refuses to release as many fat-releasing and fat-burning enzymes.
Not only this… but you lose lean body mass.
Not to mention… starvation mode leads to a direct loss of muscle, which makes your metabolism slow down even more. It becomes even more difficult to lose weight after this.
Logically, you might think that since you’re eating less, you should eat more, but it just doesn’t happen.
Outside of the cosmetic effects, you’re likely to feel more tired and have more difficulty concentrating.
People who go on low calorie diets with low calorie snacks often end up gaining more weight in the long term because they get so frustrated, give up the diet, binge, and rinse and repeat.
Calorie cycling is a great alternative to low calorie diets, as it combats all of these problems and is still completely healthy and natural.
