Diet plans continue to surprise us by being predictably useless at helping us keep off the kilos.
Lets say a person is habituated to a particular eating pattern and maintains a weight of 80 kg. He plans to shed five kg. So he embarks on a ‘weight-loss diet’ and huffin’ puffin’ reaches 75 kg. Ah! a well-deserved victory!
Now since he has already reached his goal, he does not need to continue the ‘weight-loss diet’ and goes back to the diet he earlier had which helped him maintain his weight at a steady level of 80 kg. He calls it the ‘steady-weight diet’.
Lo and behold! his weight starts increasing and getting perilously close to the original 80 kg! Why does this happen?
For the plain and simple reason that there is no ‘weight-loss diet’ or even a ‘steady-weight diet’. Consider every diet in the world to be a ‘target weight diet pegged to a particular weight’.
So when he was at 80 kg, the diet he was having at the time was a diet which was pegged to 80 kg. At 80 kg, the diet produced no change in his weight. However, if he is not at 80 kg, the diet will work to ‘pull’ him towards 80 kg. Thus if he has that food while at 75 kg, the diet will tend to bring him to 80 kg and then stay there.
I would like to predict that if he increases his weight to 85 kg and then falls back to the 80 kg diet, he will similarly come back to 80 kg. (Oooh.. wishful thinking?)
If this was not so, then theoretically a ‘weight-loss diet’ would keep on reducing your weight till you are at nil kg. But it does not. In effect, it reduces your weight to a particular point and then makes it stay there. Say at 72 kg. So actually it is not a weight-loss diet but is a ‘target weight diet pegged to 72 kg’. Stay on it indefinitely to help you ‘reach’ 72 kg and then stay at 72 kg indefinitely.
But you uncork the bubbly to celebrate your new found slim waist, and you go back to the diet which kept you steady at 80 kg, then rest assured that you are getting back there. Soon.
Also, as a corollary, you will see that the farther the target weight point of the diet is, the faster it pulls you towards itself. That explains why our weight falls much faster when we start a diet. And when we start approaching the target weight for which that diet is designed, the rate of decrease in weight slows down.
Bon apetit!