What Happens After You Come Off a Diet?

You can't stay on a diet forever, because most diets are designed to stimulate rapid weight loss and, consequently, do not provide you with the range of nutrients your body needs. When you're trying to lose weight quickly, various fad diets offer you the chance to do so by getting you to cut out some foods and only eat certain others. You can stick to these kinds of diets for awhile, because when you're losing weight you are able to stay motivated. However, eventually your body adjusts to being given fewer calories and your weight loss starts to slow down.

It is when this happens that you may be inclined to give up your diet altogether. Perhaps some of your bad habits had already began to creep in, anyway, and when you don't see any change when you step on the scales you might wonder why you're even bothering. If you're not losing any weight or only losing it very slowly you may just decide to stop following the diet even if you are yet to reach your goal weight. You tell yourself that it doesn't matter, because you have managed to lose weight and that you're in a good position to keep the weight off.

However, if you haven't learned what a healthy diet is or got into a routine of eating regularly and watching your portion sizes, the likelihood is that you're going to have difficulty maintaining your lower weight. After being on a restrictive diet for a few weeks or months, you feel that you deserve a treat and so you can quite easily go overboard at meal times. Within no time at all you can find your weight increasing and when you've already put on seven pounds or so you may just give up even trying to control your calorie intake, so that the weight keeps piling back on.

It doesn't help that your body has been in starvation mode for a period of time and is going to want to hold on to any extra calories you consume. This is only going to make controlling your weight more difficult, especially when you simply eat whatever you want and try to ignore the fact you're putting on weight again. It might be possible to keep the weight off after giving up on your diet, but it depends on how you approach weight maintenance. If you simply go back to your bad old eating habits you can't exactly expect to be able to keep the weight off.

On the other hand, if you incorporate exercise into your routine and learn to make better dietary choices you should be able to maintain your ideal weight. Of course, this becomes easier to do after a period of time when you have got into a routine of healthy eating and regular exercise, which is why it is worth getting out of the idea that you have to diet to lose weight, so that you concentrate more on making lifestyle changes.