If you eat less and move around more you’ll lose weight. Your love handles will disappear as will your stomach fat. That’s the commonly accepted idea. Sorry to say – it’s a myth! Restricted diets almost never work, and you’ll know why after reading this article.

Common sense tells you that if you eat less you’ll lose weight …. surely it will work??

Well, yes, sort of … however, it’s not that simple … You’ll find you’ll become skinny and unhealthy if you just try to eat less without thinking through all aspects!

There are mainly two objections to low calorie diets:

Firstly, the fact is that all calories are different. Processed food, with additives and treatments to make it last longer simply does not have the “good” calories found in – for example – apples and vegetables. What you have to watch is food with “bad” calories. There’s a vast difference in nutrition and benefits between processed food, rich in artificial additives and natural foodstuffs.

You want to get slimmer and healthier, lose stomach fat, get rid of love handles – everything. It wouldn’t work even if you starved yourself.

A dramatic example would be to ONLY drink “Zero Coke” – that fizzy is completely empty – no calories, no nutrition. Would you lose weight? Certainly. Will you be healthy? Absolutely not! Very soon you’ll be badly malnourished …..

Calories is the fuel your body needs to live. Some foods require more energy to metabolize than what they provide.

Three strips of bacon and an apple are roughly 100 calories each. Think of the difference for your body eating an apple or eating bacon … will you get fat from the apples or from the bacon?

Scondly, muscle is more efficient at using up calories than fat is. Muscle is very much alive, it uses a lot of calories to stay healthy, whilst fat is a “dead weight” in your body. Fat is metabolically speaking inert. People who are slim and lean seem to be able to eat more than overweight people, and that’s the reason – and people who are overweight watch what they eat.

Of course this is all a bit simplified, there are other aspects that are important as well to get rid of love handles and stomach fat. Union rules apply to fat as well – last in first out. The fat you first put on – most often found on your thighs and around your midriff – is the last to disappear!

Patience is needed if you truly want to lose love handles, and some muscle building as well. You didn’t put on weight from one day to another, nor did the love handles appear overnight. It will take time to get rid of the excess, but it’ll melt off you far quicker than you put it on.

If you don’t eat enough calories – energy – your body will use your muscle tissue as fuel, not the fat. You need a well functioning metabolism – provided by muscles – and if you don’t have that your body will not be able to use up your excess fat.

You will se some “results” from most low calorie diets – you lose muscle tissue and you lose water, so you appear to slim down. But long term they don’t work!