Dieting isn't easy. You need some help? We're here to help you with your weight loss. Many psychological variables have been suggested as causes of obesity, including lack of impulse control, poor ability to delay gratification, and maladaptive eating styles (primary eating to fast). However, in a review of the literature found that none of those suggestions has received empirical support. Rodin and her colleagues also found that unhappiness and depression seem to be the effects of obesity, not its cause and that dieting behavior seems to make the problem worse.
There is no single, all-inclusive explanation for obesity, but there are many partial ones. Habit plays an important role in the control of food intake. Early in life, when we are most active, we form our idea about how much food constitutes a meal. Later in life, we become less active, but we do always reduce our food intake accordingly. We fill our plates according to what we think is a proper sized meal (or perhaps the plate is filled for us), and we eat everything, ignoring that satiety signals that might tell us to stop before the plate is empty.
One reason that many people have so much difficulty losing weight is that metabolic factors appear to play an important role in obesity. In fact, a good case can be made that obesity is most often not an eating disorder but rather a metabolic disorder. Metabolism refers to the physiological process, including the production of energy from nutrients that take place within an organism. Just as cars differ in their fuel efficiency, so do people. Rose and William studied pairs of people who were matched for weight, height, age and activity. Some of these matched pairs differed by a factor of two in the number of calories they eat each day. People with an efficient metabolism have calories left over to deposit in the long term nutrient reservoir; thus, they have difficulty keeping the reservoir from growing. In contract, people with an inefficient metabolism can eat large meals without getting fat. Thus, a fuel efficient automobile is desirable; a fuel efficient body runs the risk of becoming obese.
Many people don't know how to diet, they diet and then they relapse, thus undergoing large changes in body weight. Some investigators have suggested that starvation causes the body's metabolism to become more efficient. For example:
Browel research on how to diet
He fed rats a diet that made them become obese and then restricted their food intake until their body weights returned to normal. Then they made the rats fat again and reduced their intake again. The second time, the rats become fat much faster and lost their weight much more slowly. Clearly, the experience of gaining and losing large amounts of body weight altered the animal's metabolic efficiency. They also obtained evidence that the same phenomenon (called the yo-yo effect) take place in human. They measure the resting metabolic rate in two groups of adolescent wrestlers: those who fasted just before a competition and binged afterwards and those who did not. The investigators found that wrestlers who fasted and binged developed more efficient metabolism. Possibly, those people will have difficulty maintaining body weight as they get older.