Once you have discovered what factors tend to sabotage. Your weight-loss efforts, you will be well on your way to Successful weight control. To be successful, however, you must plan for success. By setting goals that are too far in the future or unrealistic for your current lifestyle, you will doom yourself to failure. Do not try to lose 40 pounds in four month. Try, instead, to lose a healthy 1 to 2 pounds during the firs week, and stay with this slow and easy regimen. Reward yourself when you lose pounds, and if you binge and go off your nutrition plan, get right back on it the next day. Remember that you did not gain 40 pounds in eight weeks, so it is unrealistic to punish your body by trying to lose that amount of weight in such a short time.

Seek assistance from reputable sources in selecting a dietary plan that is easy to follow and includes adequate amounts of the basic nutrients. Registered dieticians, some physicians (not all physicians have strong backgrounds in nutrition), health educators and exercise physiologists with nutritional backgrounds, and other health professionals can provide reliable information. Look out for people who call themselves “nutritionists.” There is no such official designation, leaving the door open for just about anyone to call himself or herself a nutritional expert. Avoid quick weight-loss programs that promise miracle results. The majority are expensive, and most people regain the weight soon after completing the program. Ask questions about the credentials of the adviser in any weight-loss program, assess the nutrient value of the prescribed diet, verify that dietary guidelines are consistent with information from reliable dietary research, and analyze the suitability of the diet to your tastes, budget, and lifestyle to avoid putting yourself in a risky, expensive, or unhealthy dietary situation. Any diet that requires radical behavior changes is doomed to failure. Nutritional plans that do not ask you to sacrifice everything you enjoy and that allow you to make choices are generally the most successful. See Table 15.3 on page 378 for a comparison of some of the most popular diet and weight-loss programs. Many of these programs have been shown to be harmful.

"Miracle" Diets

Fasting, starvation diets, and other forms of very low calorie diets (VLCDs) have been shown to cause significant health risks. Typically, when you deprive your body of food for prolonged periods, your body makes adjustments to save you from inevitable organ shutdown. It begins to deplete its energy reserves to obtain necessary fuels. One of the first reserves the body turns to maintain its supply of glucose is lean, protein tissue. As this occurs, you lose weight rapidly, because protein contains only half as many calories per pound as fat. At the same time, significant water stores are lost. Over time, the body begins to run out of liver tissue, heart muscle, blood, and so on, as these readily available substances are burned to supply energy: Only after the readily available proteins from these sources are depleted will your body begin to burn fat reserves. In this process, known as ketosis, the body adapts to prolonged fasting or carbohydrate deprivation by converting body fat to ketones, which can be used as fuel for some brain cells. Within about 10 days after the typical adult begins a complete fast, the body has used many of its energy stores and death may occur.

In very low calorie diets, powdered formulas are usually given to patients under medical supervision. These formulas have daily values of from 400 to 700 calories plus vitamin and mineral supplements. Although these diets may be beneficial for people who have failed at all conventional weight loss methods and who face severe threats to their health that are complicated by their obesity, they should never be undertaken without strict medical supervision. Problems associated with fasting, VLCDs, and other forms of severe calorie deprivation include blood sugar imbalances, cold intolerance, constipation, decreased BMR, dehydration, diarrhea, emotional problems, fatigue, headaches, heart irregularity, ketosis, kidney infections and failure, loss of lean body tissue, weakness, and weight gain due to the yo-yo effect and other variables.

Read nutrition information with weight loss diet plans and fat burning diets.