Boost Your Metabolism

As we discussed earlier in this book (but it's so important that it deserves an encore here at the end), trying to lose weight by drastically cutting down calories doesn't work; in fact, it's unhealthy.

The thing to remember is that the body's ability to lose weight is not controlled by calories.  Calories are the input.  The real control mechanism is that famous concept that you've become very familiar with: metabolism. 

Calories are merely units of energy.  It's how your body deals with that energy that determines whether weight is gained or lost. 

So with that being said, cutting down your caloric intake to, say, 1000 calories a day isn't necessarily going to help you lose weight; because it doesn't necessarily change your metabolism. 

Indeed, as you know, if you slow down your caloric intake, your body – which is always trying to help you in the best way that it knows how – will slow down its metabolism. 

Really, it makes sense: the body says that something has gone wrong; instead of the 2000 calories that it needs, it's only getting 1000.  The body doesn't know why this is happening; it doesn't know that you want to lose weight. 

It just senses that something is wrong; perhaps you're trapped in a cave or something, or stuck in a snowstorm.  So the body, trying to help you, will slow down its metabolism; it will do its best to slow down the conversion rate, so that you have as much energy on hand as possible.

Now, if your body was able to read this book and you could say: look, please just do what you normally do, but do it with 1000 fewer calories a day for a while, then we might actually get somewhere. 

But the body doesn't work that way.  It won't help you lose weight if you dramatically cut down on calories.

 It will slow down metabolism, and (here's the worst part), if and when you ever increase calories again, your body will have to deal with that via a slower metabolic engine.  So you can actually gain weight if, after cutting down your calories for a period of time, you find that you consume extra calories (say while on vacation or something).