Yo-yo Effect After A Successful Diet?

Why do you often gain weight again after a successful diet? Here you can find out more about the unwanted yo-yo effect.

Do you know that, too? After three months of a strict diet, you’ve finally made it to the beach figure or just lost a few extra pounds. At last! Goal achieved! Your scale shows the ideal weight. After a few weeks though … the fat is back. The yo-yo effect !

Why does this happen so often? Did you do something wrong? This is very likely, and that’s why we want to explain the most common causes of this yo-yo effect to you in this article . Why are we gaining weight again when we least expect it?

1. Skipping meals as the cause of the yo-yo effect

A simple example shows you immediately what it’s about: Imagine your girlfriend wants to lose weight quickly because summer is just around the corner.

To do this, she imposes her own strict regime, which basically consists of skipping dinner, barely having breakfast and having a little something here during the day, a snack there, only to come home in the evening and nothing to eat.

Ultimately, this means that she will not eat anything for 10 to 12 hours straight, which will put the body on alert. He then activates his energy reserves, whatever that may be.

When normal is restored, the opposite happens. The energy reserves are re-created so that the body is prepared for renewed, unexpected times of starvation.

So what our friend is doing is not healthy at all. You cannot stop eating overnight and you cannot limit yourself to two meals a day. The organism classifies this as a threatening situation and the brain initiates appropriate countermeasures.

2. The Risk of Low Calorie Diets

This is the classic case of a very restrictive diet in which we eat 5 meals a day, but which puts our body’s diet in a very dangerous imbalance.

This is especially true of those diets for which we are supposed to consume less than 1200 kcal / day, which are almost entirely derived from carbohydrates or a source of protein.

Such diets are harmful to health. The diet is usually followed for a short period of time, two or three weeks, and often the desired weight is reached during this time.

After stopping the diet, the pounds lost come back inexplicably quickly. Every calorie ingested seems to immediately sit on your hip.

The explanation for this is as follows:

• During such restrictive diets, the glycogen stores in the liver are used up and the organism searches for reserves elsewhere. In the muscles above all, but also in the cartilage.
• There are still energy reserves available here, but in order to get to them, large amounts of water, minerals and toxic metabolic end products are released. They include urea and uric acid.
• When the so-called “miracle diet” is over, we have lost weight because the glycogen stored in the liver and muscles has been used up and because we have lost water and minerals that are important for our body.
• This deficit is compensated for when you return to the normal diet, the tissue is quickly rehydrated and the energy stores are replenished. Therefore we gain weight again in a short time.

3. The need for good dietary habits

If the diet went so well, why stop? Often times we are prone to weight gain because of habits that are not only wrong but unhealthy.

You already know that the consumption of fats, sweets and ready-made foods regularly leads to high cholesterol levels and provokes high blood pressure and other diseases of the cardiovascular system.

A good tip to avoid the yo-yo effect is therefore to incorporate our diet into our daily menu. This also doesn’t mean that you can’t snack at some point if you are aware that you can burn these additional calories again by exercising afterwards.

It is a good idea to seek advice from a nutritionist if you are looking to lose weight. Sometimes we get sick from certain foods or we have problems with certain combinations. The most important thing is still to take care of our body.

So if we are doing well with a healthy diet and can lose weight with it, then we should also take it into account when putting together our menu in the future.

4. Changed routine

That happens quite often. One of the most common reasons for the yo-yo effect is a change in our habits, an event that affects us and makes us gain weight again. Would you like to hear a few examples? You are sure to be familiar with one or the other.

• You had just lost a few pounds, but then your work hours changed. So you had to completely adjust yourself and the pounds will be back in a short time.
• Problems in the partnership.
• Additional stress from problems at home or at work.
• With summer approaching, the diet worked well. Now that it is finally here, you see everything much more relaxed, go out more, eat, drink, celebrate … And in no time you will gain weight again.