Why is Yo-yo Dieting Bad for your health and Weight?

Yo-yo dieting is a controversial fat loss technique whereby one eats sparingly to lose pounds, relaxes all slimming efforts to regain weight, and then diets again to shed the regained body mass. Also referred to as 'weight cycling', the fitness idea got its tell-tale name from the yo-yo-like process it so typically imitates.

Global stats gathered by some leading health authorities and individual medical researchers show that this often discouraged approach is actually a little more popular among overweight ladies. Recent survey data reveals it enjoyed a popularity score of 30% among women, set against a mere 10% of males who'd tried it at least once at some point in the past.

Weight cycling's overall success rates remain rather understandably scanty. This is mainly attributable to the dismal fact that the pursuers of the seemingly indecisive approach appear somewhat unwilling to undergo the really painstaking rigors necessary for achieving permanent wellness outcomes.

Highlighted hereunder are a few more specific reasons why Yo-yo diet may prove essentially bad for your health and weight.

Soaring Appetite Levels

As you diet continuously, your appetite levels tend to same gradually, until you at some point begin to feel full even with very little food. Leptin, the little-known hormone responsible for regulating our food cravings, is secreted in systematically fewer quantities as the body gets accordingly accustomed to less food on a daily basis.

Ordinarily, our systems store leptin in the bloodstream and it's released around key mealtimes throughout the day. Once we resort to taking continually reduced calories for weight loss purposes, the body adjusts as well - storing up gradually larger-than-normal amounts of fat.

And since we are indeed taking less and less servings over an extending duration, our uniquely automated anatomies start to respond similarly - issuing correspondingly smaller quantities of this appetite-regulating chemical compound.

In the course of long dieting periods, we finally begin to feel somehow content or full, even with markedly reduced food intakes. And it becomes oh-so easy to lower calorie consumption once diminished appetite levels correspond with the reduced servings recommended by whatever calorie-reduction plans we're on.

Yo-yo dieting methodology does however clearly contravene the fitness-boosting principles tacitly hinted above. Signaling the system to slow leptin secretion, and to hasten the same process within a short time confuses the delicate nature-punctuated matrix that controls core body functions.

Subsequently, diet cycling individuals eventually find themselves struggling to lower consumption against wildly soaring appetite levels.

As millions of candid consumer reviews quite unanimously point out, it's near-impossible to go against powerful hormonal forces in actual, real-life weight loss scenarios. Eating less and then switching to much more in close alternations forces the body to adopt ordinary fat storage modes, and to urge increases in appetite. In the end, clueless dieters will discover they've gained weight instead of growing slimmer.

Fat Gain Instead of Fat Loss

Although the typical Yo-yo dieter may keep a keen eye on the precise number of calories they ingest, this may not always bear the intended ultimate results. Consistently verified research findings prove the saddening truth that a fair number of such fitness candidates did actually end up gaining more fat instead.

With sharp alternations between eating ordinarily and reduced intakes, many will grow more corpulent...with undesirably less muscular 'hardiness' they'd envisioned to attain.

In another equaling telling health survey, 11 out of 19 extensive clinical surveys confirmed that the majority of the involved participants had in fact acquired more fat at the end of a weight recycling term. The simple conclusion was that such people had really failed to nail the exact long-term wellness milestones they'd envisaged at the start of the said fitness exercise.

And since solidly corroborated deductions showed that the one-off dieting methodology accelerates weight gain and not fat loss, would there be any sound rationale in trying it as a weight fitness-improving idea, to begin with?

Increased Blood Sugar Issues

Yo-yo dieting is rightly associated with increased possibilities of developing chronic blood sugar issues such as diabetes. Specifically, one in-depth study involving 15 randomly picked participants confirmed that at least each one of them had accumulated a bit of extra belly fat - some 28 days into the eye-opening, landmark experiment.

Separate studies linked added cholesterol levels to increased risks of type 2 diabetes, as well as other blood sugar complications. These groundbreaking observations also proved there was a definitive correlation between added gastrointestinal fat deposits and diabetes, than similar quantities of such fats stored elsewhere in the body.

Unhealthy fat accumulated as a result of cycle dieting has also been found to spike insulin levels in a particularly adverse diabetes-causing manner, unlike cholesterol accumulations sustained in a more systematic fashion under ordinary weight-gain circumstances.

Greater Risk of Cardiovascular Complications

Weight cycling has also been consistently cited among the several factors likely to accelerate the odds of cardiovascular problems. Somewhat alternating slimming bouts followed weight gain days/weeks appear to heighten one's chances of coming down with coronary heart disease.

This is a life-threatening condition whereby evidently overwhelmed blood vessels grow ever so unhealthily narrower with time. This can in turn trigger sudden heart attacks with deadly aftereffects and dangerously higher-than-safe blood pressure readings.

More substantial research-compiled conclusions painted a further worrying trend. They portrayed the sheer extents of cardiovascular arrests linked to obesity as tending to worsen accordingly, if this fat gain happened more abruptly.

Those distinctive case studies amply clarified the crucial point that a far lighter individual who has undergone a rather more sudden surge in weight faced greater possibilities of suffering fatal heart attacks...than significantly heavier persons weighing many more pounds gained over notably longer and fairly more gradual timelines.

Guest post: Jason Coote