nutrient-barren foods—which were not meeting your nutrient needs in the first place, even when
you were eating them in larger quantities! (Of course, this trap is also rooted in another
unquestioned underlying trap, which is weight-loss only as the end-all goal.)
When people “fail” to stay on a low-cal diet (eating too few calories to meet your energy needs), it’s
not a sign that they don’t have willpower or that something is wrong with them. It’s natural to
struggle with a low-cal diet, because it feels awful, and for good reason. Shortchanging your body of
the fuel it needs for energy is not a great weight-loss or health strategy (as is assumed by most); it’s
in fact a recipe for failure.
The shortfall in needed calories (energy) you create with such a diet isn’t a good thing that will
simplistically make your body “use up all your fat to bridge the gap.” That idea comes from
ignorance and simplistic thinking (and the misguided “A Calorie is a Calorie” theory we looked at
earlier). Instead, that gap between what you need and what you provide ironically works against
you.
The truth is that more you diet, the more efficient your body becomes at using food. The more you
deprive your body of calories, the more it slows down. Therefore, it becomes harder to lose weight.
“In periods of food shortage, the body slows down the metabolism
to conserve energy. Just as a motorist who is running out of fuel
tries to go easy on the accelerator and drive very smoothly to
conserve gas, the body does the same sort of thing when food is in
short supply. It turns down the metabolic flame to save as much of
the fat on your body as possible until the starvation period is
over...the more your food intake drops, the harder your body tries
to keep from losing fat.”- Neal Barnard, M.D., founder and president
of the Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine
This is why some of the people with the strongest willpower in the world are some of the most
overweight people. The better they get at depriving themselves, the better their bodies get at
slowing down and conserving (the exact opposite of what they’d hoped to produce).
If you lack this information and are diet-trapped, the failure of overweight people to deprive
themselves to health and fitness looks like a confusing mystery. It’s not.
When people who have tried deprivation diets experience feelings of guilt and shame about “falling
off” their diets, “giving in to temptation,” “cheating,” or “gaining back all the weight they lost,”
they’re being needlessly victimized by this diet trap in a profoundly personal way.
Dieters often equate an ability to live in a state of ever-increasing hunger and constant withdrawal
with moral virtues like self-control and self-discipline. They’ve been encouraged to regard their