The latest craze of diet books saying “eliminate 500 calories a day and lose 1 pound a week” – just doesn’t
work. If you do the math, it sounds good on paper. There are 3500 calories in 1 pound, so if you eat 500
calories a day less than what you need, at least in theory, you should lose 1 pound in a week. Except this doesn’t
work in practice, because the problem is not caloric deficiency but fat storage. If you are eating much more than
50 grams of carbohydrates a day, the bet is you will not lose 1 pound a week cutting out 500 calories a day –
because your body will take all the carbohydrates you are eating and use them to store fat. In general, keeping
calories as low as possible works for weight maintenance, but it doesn’t work for weight loss. In order to lose
weight, you have to stop fat storage. And the most efficient want to stop fat storage, is to limit carbohydrates to
5-10 grams per feeding. You have to cut calories too, in order to lose weight. If you are eating much more than
1500 calories a day, you’re not going to lose weight fast enough to keep you on your diet. Diets are deprivation
hell and no fun. So if you are going to lose weight, you have to see results, and if you are going to see results,
your calories almost always have to be below 1500 a day, and your total carbohydrate intake no more than
about 20 grams a day.