One of the ongoing battles as a personal trainer is ensuring people are not only doing the correct exercise but are also thinking about nutrition. We all enjoy our food and obviously it is a necessity but a bit of knowledge can go along way to help.

Everyone will have heard of some form of diet either through TV, stars or friends. At the end of the day a diet to lose weight is taking in less calories then we actually expend (no rocket science involved) but it is how we do this.

One of the biggest problems with diet courses or fad diets is the yo-yo effect, once you have followed the diet you have lost the weight, then after the next few months all the weight reappears and more!

Most diets will advise a drop of 500 calories per day to safely lose weight and this will equate to around 1 pound of weight loss in a week. Whilst we follow a nutrition plan it is great as we are eating a good balance and hence we lose the weight.

There are several factors that will affect the longevity and success of the diet; whether we do exercise, how we eat after the diet and our body’s natural response.

If we do not exercise our we will lose muscle, this will occur more so in a diet as we are not getting the calories, hence we need to keep training to prevent muscle loss and to ensure that it is mainly fat mass we are losing and also to maintain our metabolism.

After a structured diet plan we fall back into our old eating habits as we no longer have a guide to follow. It is these old habits that made us put on weight in the first place, therefore we will gain weight again.

Our bodies still work in the same way as when we lived in caves and our lifestyle was very different. When we deplete the number of calories we take in our body can go into a famine response, thinking that the reason for the reduced calorie intake is that no food can be found or grown. When we go into famine response our body does not need as many calories and it prepares for when the famine is over. The body becomes more efficient at storing calories and fat to prepare for any futures famines.