by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: January 20, 2009   Last Updated: June 25, 2009

Dieting can be an extremely frustrating means of losing weight, and can at times, actually do more harm than good. It is common knowledge that most diets which encourage a rapid weight loss don't work over the long term. When your body loses weight too quickly, or when your food intake routine changes dramatically your body notices the change, and takes a defensive stance against this change. The body mistakenly takes the weight loss as potential starvation, and it desperately attempts to prevent this threat from occurring, so it uses everything in its arsenal to keep you from losing weight.

You feel like you are starving yourself, but the body's defenses slow down your metabolism, and also begin to make better use of any food that it does receive so that you stop losing weight. You feel like you are hungry because your body is sending you messages that are encouraging you to get eating again. This phenomenom is known as a "diet plateau", and it is your body's attempt to effectively slow down, or stop any further weight loss from occurring.

These dieting plateaus are often known as "hitting the wall" and these frustrating periods of dieting are a natural defense mechanism by your body. The plateau usually occurs at around the third to fourth week after dieting begins, and it can then be a constant and reoccurring factor from that point in the diet, onwards. The worst news is that your body remembers this information from previous diet attempts so that any future weight loss attempts are more difficult to succeed in.

Besides being extremely frustrating, these plateaus are also the time period when many dieters start to believe that they are just incapable of losing any more weight, and so they give up trying to fight their bodies urge to maintain its current weight. They not only fail at their diet plan, but because their body is now trying to optimize the use of the food that it does receive, the dieter actually gains weight when they begin to once again eat at their previous level. From this point onwards the dieter often enters into a pattern of yo-yo dieting, losing weight only to regain it back, time and time again. Each time that the dieter tries to lose weight it becomes a little more difficult. With each weight loss attempt the body grows wiser as to what is occurring within it, and attempts to keep the weight loss from occurring, causing the dieting process to become more and more difficult. This vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting leads to anxiety, frustration,

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