11/11/2025
Here is a short excerpt from my new book (DIETS-Think Outside the Box)
The Diet Trap — Why “Eat Less, Move More” Backfires
For the past half-century, we’ve been taught that weight loss is simple math.
If you eat less and move more, you’ll lose weight. Period.
It’s a message that’s been drilled into our heads by doctors, personal trainers, nutritionists, and nearly every major diet company in existence. They’ve convinced us that body weight is nothing more than a numbers game — a neat equation of calories in versus calories out.
But if that equation were true, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic.
We wouldn’t have a billion-dollar diet industry built on repeat customers.
And we certainly wouldn’t have millions of frustrated, exhausted people trying harder every year — only to end up fatter, slower, and more discouraged than before.
The truth is this: the “eat less, move more” philosophy is not only oversimplified — it’s biologically flawed.
It’s a theory that ignores how astonishingly intelligent and adaptive the human body really is. You are not a calculator. You are a living, breathing, self-regulating organism designed for balance and survival — not spreadsheets and calorie charts. The human body doesn’t think in math; it thinks in chemistry and biology.
That’s the trap: trying to solve a biological equation with mathematical logic.
For decades, people have blamed themselves when “the math” stopped working — when calories went down, workouts went up, and yet the scale refused to move. But what if the real issue isn’t your lack of discipline? What if your body isn’t broken — it’s protecting you?
When You Eat Less, Your Body Fights Back
Let’s get one thing straight: your body is not out to sabotage you. It’s trying to save you.
When you cut calories drastically, your body interprets that as a threat to survival. Our DNA still carries the ancient coding of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Back then, food scarcity wasn’t a diet — it was a death sentence. Those who adapted by slowing their metabolism, reducing energy output, and storing fat for future use survived. Those who didn’t… didn’t make it.
So, when you drop from 2,000 calories to 1,000 overnight, your body doesn’t see it as “progress.” It sees it as “famine.”
The moment your brain senses energy shortage, it flips a biological switch that changes everything:
• Your thyroid hormones slow down, reducing the rate at which you burn calories.
• Your body temperature may subtly drop as your system conserves heat.
• You unconsciously move less — fewer gestures, less fidgeting, slower walks.
• Hunger hormones like ghrelin skyrocket, and cravings intensify.
These changes happen quietly, beneath your awareness, but they have massive impact.
Your body isn’t malfunctioning — it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
When your metabolism slows and your hunger increases, that’s not self-sabotage. It’s biology screaming, “We need food to survive.”
Now imagine what happens when, after weeks of deprivation, you finally “break down” and eat a normal meal. Your body doesn’t waste that energy — it hoards it. It stores it as fat, especially visceral fat around the abdomen, the kind it can access quickly in emergencies.
That’s the cruel irony of dieting: the harder you try to starve yourself thin, the more efficiently your body learns to store fat.
What most people call a “plateau” isn’t a lack of progress; it’s your body’s emergency brake. It’s the survival system activating.
And when you resume normal eating, your metabolism remains in low-power mode — so those calories pile up faster than ever.
That’s the diet trap in full swing.
FINAL COVER NOT DECIDED ON!
