What Your Nutritionist Would Tell You

The formula for weight management is easy: calories consumed - calories burned = net gain or loss.

Like it or not, there is no way to get around it. Even if you eat all of your calories in the form of grapefruit and cabbage soup, even if you use that ab roller every day, even if you never eat another carb again, there is no magic bullet. If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. Conversely, if you consume less calories than you burn, you will lose.

(What Your Nutritionist Won't Tell You...)

That said, there is a little more you want to keep in mind to improve the efficiency of the weight loss process. Many people catch on to the weight management formula and run straight for whatever restrictive diet they can find. They drastically reduce by eating only a few hundred calories a day, or by eating all one food.

Yes, you could theoretically drastically reduce your caloric intake and starve yourself thin, but that has some ugly side effects. Many experts believe that extreme weight-loss cycles actually CAUSE weight gain, because your metabolism is preparing for potential famine. That fact is contested and is still being studied, but the fact that fad diets are unhealthy is pretty much universally agreed upon. Extreme reduction in your caloric intake leaves your body running in survival mode, meaning it shuts down all nonessential processes. In addition to wreaking havoc on your metabolism, it also destroys your energy levels, makes you irritable, and depletes your lean muscle mass. No point in being skinny if you'll also be a tired, cranky bit of flab. Not to mention, starvation diets are hard to maintain for long-term weight loss and as such, often result in the yo-yo effect.

Single food diets are also dangerous, and not just because they rely on drastic caloric reductions. Single food diets (the grapefruit diet, cabbage soup diet, Atkins) are a fast track to malnutrition. (And before the tidal wave of Atkins fan hate mail comes in, YES I'VE TRIED IT!) Restricting your dietary sources to only a few food types results in your body not receiving the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients it needs. Low-fat diets tend to be short on Omega-3 fatty acids and protein. High-protein diets tend to be short on fiber and vitamins. The grapefruit diet is short on... everything. Let's face facts here. The grapefruit diet will give you diarrhea, the Atkins diet will make you constipated, and no-fat or no-sugar diets will frankly make you more than a little psycho.

Ultimately, your body is a primed energy conserving machine. And in biological terms, energy = fat. Thousands of generations of evolution have made the human body very good at what it does. The only way to succeed here is to trick your body into believing that there is no reason to store up fat.

For health AND success, you have to follow a few simple rules:

1. Burn more calories than you consume.
2. Eat a variety of foods with a variety of nutrients.
3. Eat at regular intervals throughout the day.
4. Aim for a weight-loss of only a pound or two a week.