The key to loosing weight and keeping it off is your metabolism. If you attempt to eat fewer calories than your allowance (which we calculated in Section 3.0) then you’ve taken a step in the right direction. However, you should only reduce your intake by five hundred calories a day as that has been scientifically proven to be enough to shift fat. If you decide to reduce your intake by more than this, you may suffer the following side effects:

· Losing lean muscle tissue. When your body needs food it finds it easier to break down muscle than to break down fat. If your intake is too low, you won’t have enough carbohydrate in your body to fuel your muscles and brain.
· A drop in your metabolism. Muscle is your metabolic engine and will burn energy even when at rest. If you lose muscle tissue, your metabolism will drop.
· Your body needs fewer calories. When you return to normal eating habits you will have less muscle tissue and subsequently a lower metabolism.
· You put on weight when you eat as you did previously. Because you now need less, if you return to your previous diet, you’ll put on even more weight.
· Low calorie diets cause your body to start storing as it would during times of famine. A hormone (lipase) that makes you super efficient at storing fat for up to six months after your diet has ended causes this.