Depending on what you eat and how much you exercise, weight control diets can be both good and bad. Most weight control diets require that you restrict your calorie intake to about a thousand or less calories per day.

Restricting your calories to such an extent makes your body feel like it’s in a famine, and so it goes into starvation mode. As a result, your body starts preparing for the next “famine” by holding on to every calorie it can.

Thus, when you go back to eating regular food or when you cheat on your diet you start gaining a lot of weight.

This is why most weight control diets aren’t effective. You end up gaining all the weight that was lost, and often you gain more weight than you lose.

It’s a good idea to create a deficit of a few calories instead of cutting back on a thousand or less calories per day, especially since your body doesn’t like to starve.

First you need to calculate the number of calories that your body needs everyday to maintain its current weight. Your daily caloric requirement can be calculated using any of the following two formulae: The Harris-Benedict Formula and The Katch-McArdle Formula.

(If you want a little more info, just do a simple Google search.)

Once you know your daily caloric requirement, in order to find your calorie intake for weight loss, simply reduce 15% to 20% from it.

Reducing your calorie intake by such a small amount will not make you prone to putting back on any weight that you lose, because it won’t trigger a starvation response.

Weight control diets such as the “cabbage soup diets” and “celery and cream cheese diets” are examples of diets that are designed for crash dieting.

These often require that you eat only one or two kinds of foods.

Excluding all other types of foods, you can eat as much of the prescribed foods as you want.

You really don’t need a doctorate in biology to figure out how wrong this is.

While you do lose some weight in the beginning, such weight control diets deny your body the necessary nutrition.

To make matters worse, you tend to easily gain the weight back on, and then some, because such diets trigger the starvation response.

The best weight control diets will require you to follow a healthy diet and exercise regularly.

Good weight control diets result from this perfect mix.

Your body starts to burn calories more effectively and quickly when you exercise, because exercise increases your metabolic rate.

Moreover, the protein required to build lean muscle is also provided by such diets.

You start to burn calories faster than you would otherwise as the increase in muscle mass raises your metabolic rate.

Since the minimal calorie reduction does not reduce the increased metabolic rate, you are able to burn calories such that you can lose weight in a healthy manner.

The market is filled with hundreds of books on weight control diets that make you eat unusual combinations of foods or impose strict limits on the amount of calories you consume.

You cannot expect these diets to work.

Follow the link below for more information on weight control diets that can help you burn fat in a healthy manner….

The myths and truths behind weight control diets.