Fat Loss Tips.

Is your diet secretly making you fat by forcing you to eat more than you should?

By restricting what you can and can’t eat, most diets mean that lots of your favorite foods are now forbidden. Realistically how long do you think you can live for and not eat your favorite foods? And if you could, would life really be that much fun?

Restrictive diets don’t work – and scientific research has proven it.

Most people find food less appealing when they have already eaten. In one scientific study, slim people rated food as less desirable after they had eaten a lot of it. Overweight people didn’t. They thought it tasted just as good even when they’d eaten platefuls of it.

Diets sound great in theory, but they all share a major flaw; it’s extremely difficult to endure intense food cravings for any length of time. To make matters worse, you are surrounded by temptation. You know that forbidden fruit is the sweetest of all. And to add insult to injury, diets focus on food, which means they constantly remind you about the things you cannot have.

If you possess immense willpower you can put up with the cravings for a while. But the chances are you won’t be able to live like that for the rest of your life. So eventually you’11 abandon the diet and go back to your normal way of eating. Once again, your bad habits will have got the better of you.

For a diet to work, then every day – for the rest of your life – will have to be a diet day!

And who wants to spend their life like that? Dieters tell us they wake up in the morning and the first thing they think of is food. Images of toast, chocolate, cakes and chips float through their minds. There’s not a lettuce leaf in sight.

Through an immense effort of will, these thoughts are pushed aside. This obviously makes you unhappy. So if you’re on a diet, the first thing you feel in the morning is a lingering sense of unhappiness, of paradise lost. It takes a lot of willpower to force yourself to continue living like this for any length of time. The sensual temptations are just too powerful to ignore. How long can you remain in a constant state of self-denial? Is it really possible to be restrained all of the time? Quite simply, no it isn’t. We’re not designed that way. We are hedonists who will always get our pleasures in the end. And the constant denial is not just miserable, it also induces feelings of anxiety and despair. Not only are these feelings just as corrosive as hunger, they are infinitely more damaging psychologically.

The results have been used by relief workers helping the victims of famine and natural disasters ever since. Interestingly, as soon as the conscientious objectors started to lose weight, they became obsessed with food. They spent inordinate amounts of time chatting about food, planning meals and creating recipes. In short, they developed an almost pornographic obsession with food. Sound familiar?

To illustrate the point, in the 1950s, a group of conscientious objectors in America embarked on a controlled hunger strike to see how extreme lack of food affected the human body. In essence, they were starved, studied and brought back to health.

Trying not to think about food, when you are famished, is virtually impossible. And thinking about food inevitably leads to one thing – eating it.