Find out what your body knows that you don't. If you have tried several times to lose weight, and it doesn't seem to work as well as before, you might be in for a surprise.

This is going to come as a surprise, but you have a built-in system that is going to prevent your diet from working. It's like when a bear stores up fat for the winter, his body stores stops burning that fat at the normal rate. The bear's metabolism (not the bear himself) says,"Hey, remember the last time when the food stopped coming for a couple months? It looks like that's going to happen again. If there is going to be a food shortage for the next couple months, I won't burn the calories." The bear has a built-in system for not losing weight based on the food supply called the hibernation mode.

So do you.

This is a physiological instinct. It is as natural in your own body, or the bear's, as a heartbeat. You can't dictate to it or control it any more than you can make your heart change rhythm. Here is what happens in a person: When you decide to go on a diet for the very first time, your body doesn't realize that this will be a temporary suspension of intake, so it just keeps on burning the calories at the normal rate which leads to a great weight loss. You slim right down, and everything is terrific. That happens the first time.

Here you can see that as you lose all the weight you wanted to, and are very happy with the results, your body is asking what had happened to the food supply. It make the decision that "When the food comes back I'm going to have to store up, so I'm ready if this happens again."

Now you are happy because you lost the weight. So happy, in fact, that once you have gotten to your weight loss goal, you're right back to the same eating and exercise habits that led you to the diet in the first place. But, your body is making plans to keep store extra weight in case it runs out of food again.

Sooner or later you look in the mirror and see that you put all the weight back on. You go to your great diet where you lost all that weight, but something different happens this time: the weight doesn't melt off like it did before.

Why? Your body has activated its hibernation mode. Your body recognizes that the food supply has just shut down so it takes an animal instinct function of "winterizing" the metabolism. When there's no food coming in it must be hibernation time! I won't burn the calories.

That is not a choice that you knowingly make, it's simply a reaction. Your body's physiology recognizes the food cutoff and responds to it. The diet takes longer and longer to get the job done, but eventually you reach your goal weight, and go off the diet and back to your old ways. You start piling on the pounds faster now, because your body is making a survival decision: fatten up, because there will be more of these winter periods, and they may get a lot longer. You get into the well known "yo-yo" pattern: put a little on and fight to get it off, then put more on, then take that off, and over and over and over.

This is the whole problem. As you go on a diet for a fix for your weight situation, you have to be aware that part of your brain is not going to co-operate. Your brain won't let you lose weight time after time on the same plan.

Bottom line: Weight loss isn't about a short term change in your food intake. True weight loss is about long term change in your eating habits. If you eat too much for your body to burn, you will get fat. Worse, if you eat and stop eating time after time your body will store fat from every meal. If your body sees the food supply shutting down it will tell your metabolism to burn calories more slowly, so you may only use 1500 calories the next day instead of 2500. Instead of losing weight, because your body doesn't want to let you starve, you may go on a diet and gain weight.

In truth, the only way you can control weight loss is to take away the need. Study your own habits that are leading to weight gain and change them. That means food intake, diet, and exercise. Ugh, exercise! You know, like when you go to the gym and work out, and then stop on the way home for an ice cream. Your mind is thinking about losing weight, but your body is saying that you deserve the ice cream for having worked out, but actually your body is tricking you into adding more calories so it can keep itself going.