What causes the Yo-Yo-Effect?

Sometimes, we have to go far back in time to be able to understand ourselves and human beings at all, because we are the product of countless years of evolution.

Back to the Roots

The thing that counted most in this former period of time, was the pure survival! Otherwise, we already would have been extincted and therefore would not need to worry about dieting and weight loss today.

Behind the care of not being eaten, the most important point in survival is not to starve. This might be hard to imagine in a time in which the food is abounding, but if we imagine having to collect our food and having to kill animals to get to meat - also in the winter - it should certainly be plausible that it was not always easy to get food.

For this reason, it was absolutely essential for the stone-age people to survive even hard times with little food. In these times of distress, it was important to get along with less food than usual. For such cases, the body has learned to reduce its energy consumption and the basal metabolic rate. Because with the same energy needs like in good times, probably one would have died.

Early Stone Age versus Modern Diets

Now, lets come to our diet. If we are reducing our food or perhaps, if we are eating nothing any more, our body automatically goes into its stone-age program: the body thinks that a phase of distress starts and hence the energy consumption must be reduced. And this is exactly the thing, our body does. Even today.

In addition, our body goes to our energy reserves, we are losing weight. This is the time up to which the things are happening like we wanted when thinking about a diet.

Eating after Diet

At some point, we have lost enough weight. We want to turn back to our former life and we would like to take a little sin (which should also be allowed). However, we must remember that at that time, our body is still in its emergency program with a reduced energy conversion.

And it is a fact, that always when giving the body more energy or food than it needs, our body is using the additional energy for the next time of distress and starts storing the energy in its fat reserves - we are gaining weight. And exactly in the phase after a diet, our body needs very little energy and can therefore save a great part of the energy we take so that we are gaining.

Exactly this constellation leads to our feared yo-yo effect. No sooner than our weight is down, it quickly starts rising up again like a yo-yo so that we get back our old weight and the diet has brought nothing more than frustration. Often, after the yo-yo effect, the weight is even higher than it was before the diet.

Avoiding the Yo-Yo Effect

Being aware of these mechanisms, we can circumvent the yo-yo effect successfully. How to do this, I am showing in my article about 10 helpful tips to avoid the yo-yo effect. These tips show you what you have to do and how you should proceed while dieting and losing weight to keep your weight low as long as possible.