By Dr. Michael F. Roizen M.D. & Dr. Mehmet C. Oz M.D.

What a Waist - You: On a Diet Work Smarter, Not Harder

When you lose weight without exercise, you lose both muscle and fat, but when you gain weight without exercise, you gain only fat. It’s much easier to gain fat weight than it is to gain muscle weight, which is one of the reasons why yo-yo dieting fails so miserably. When you continually gain and lose, and gain and lose. You end up gaining proportionally even more fat, because of the muscle loss that takes place every time you lose.

High LDL cholesterol, low HDL, (healthy type of ) cholesterol, causes inflammation in your arteries and a higher risk of aging arteries that causes memory loss, heart disease, even wrinkles.

One genetic problem associated with being overweight is called leptin deficiency (leptin is a hormone associated with felling full after you eat. People who either don’t produce leptin or block signals usually become morbidly obese, and the problem is surely genetic.

While some people have these abnormalities, they tend to be the minority of the population. If you need to lose twenty-five, thirty-five, even fifty pounds your problem is not likely to be genetic. Only when your excess weight exceeds one hundred pounds would most doctors consider testing for genetic abnormalities.

The difference between obese people and thin people isn’t the number of fat cells, it’s the size of these cells. You don’t make more fat cells the fatter you get. You have the same number of fat cells you had as an adolescent. The only difference is that the fat globules within each cell increase as you store more fat. By the way, muscle works the same way, you don’t make more muscle cells; the muscle cells get larger.

Don’t under eat, when our ancestors couldn’t find food and went for long periods of time without it, their bodies acted like a life preserver storing fat in anticipation of the inevitable periods of famine. When you try to "diet" by going for long periods of time without eating, or by eating way too few calories. Your brain senses the starvation and sends an SOS signal through your body to store fat, because a famine is on it’s way. That’s why people who go on extreme fasts and extremely low calorie diets don’t lose the expected weight. They store fat as a natural protective mechanism. To lose weight, you have to keep your body from switching into starvation mode. The only way to do it is to. Eat often, in the form of frequent health, meals and snacks.

Evidence, gathered by doctors watching people who fasted all day, or worked all-night-shifts. Who ate all 2,000 daily calories in one meal gain more weight than those who space these calories over three meals. Why? Because the one-timers are making their bodies want to store fat rather than burn it.

Your stomach secrets ghrelin in pulses every half hour, sending subtle chemical impulses to your brain, When you’re really hungry or dieting, those messages come fast every twenty minutes or so and they’re amplified. So you get more signals and stronger signals that your body wants food. After long periods, your body can’t ignore those messages. That’s why depravation dieting can never work. It’s impossible to fight the biology of your body. Ghrelin also promotes eating by increasing the secretion of growth hormone. So when you increase ghrelin levels you stimulate that growth hormone to kick in, and growth hormone builds you not only up but out as well.

Tip from Nightflower313: Check out our store for the Metabolic fat brunner. It helps you burn fat. We also carry Hoodia to curb your hunger pains. This is helpful when you are trying to lower your food intake.