Do weight loss diets not work?

diet does not work An article in the Huffington Post reveals five reasons why weight loss diets are doomed to fail or don’t work anyway: it is good to specify that when you hear that diets do not work, it almost never means in the short term. Go on a diet and lose weight. Ok, the diet worked. But if after a year or two you are full stop, can you say that the diet really worked? A question that seems trivial but it is not. Let me explain. If you lose two kilos on a diet, which is negligible weight, it is obvious that in a year or two you can have it back very well, because any of us normally fluctuate between one or two kilos. In short, these are normal physiological reasons, but if the kilos were fifteen, after a year or two if you have eaten a good diet you should not have regained weight, returning exactly to the starting point if not worse . In fact, people usually do not gain weight or lose ten or fifteen kilos from one year to the next, unless they have eaten or have had health problems. Instead, most people, that is ninety percent of people, always gain weight after having done the diet.
So it can be said that in the long term, weight loss diets do not work or that they only work if you are always on a diet.

The reasons are these and all revolve around cortisol, or the stress hormone:
1) Being on a diet stresses us, and makes us release cortisol:according to some researchers, a dietary / caloric restriction releases higher levels of cortisol, due both to the fact that blood glucose is lowered and to the occurrence of prolonged fasting periods.
2) Cortisol makes us eat more: in general, those on a diet experience more episodes (or discover them for the first time) of nervous hunger, stress hunger, hunger pangs. The culprit is precisely cortisol which generally directs us to eat more sweets and fats. That’s why the more we are on a diet, the more we crave junk food.
3) Cortisol makes us fat:Having high levels of cortisol means having a body ready to pack any energy reserves as fat, rather than using it. It doesn’t matter how much we sweat, we run and so on. The first moment we let go, cortisol takes those calories and converts them into fat. Where is it? On the stomach.
4) Cortisol makes us lose lean mass: when we produce more cortisol, the body builds up as many fat reserves as possible, and to do this it also breaks down the muscles to use its proteins and glycogen. This makes us less sensitive to insulin, and consequently more and more hungry.
5) For all of the above reasons, your metabolism slows down, also to improve the defensive action of the body that tries to oppose weight loss by converting every available resource into fat. Of course it couldn’t if it burned as much as it did before. So slow down.
In short, the ideal would be to abandon the concept of diet, throw away the scales, moderate oneself at the table preferring a healthy diet, and if the clothes were to tighten a bit at the waist, go for a walk in the gym.