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Whether you eat or not, your body, designed for its sleek efficiency, continues to run. It purrs on the sugar - glucose fuel. When you stop eating, it doesn’t stop running. It shifts gears ana calls on the storead starchy glucose. As the glycogen reserve drops, it’s faithful companion ­water - also starts evaporating. As you know, water is dense and heavy. With its depletion from your cells, your body gets lighter. And when you stand on your weighing machine, a few days later, the loss is registered. This is the time you whoop victoriously, unaware that you’ve lost water ­not fat.

Oblivious to your real state, you continue to starve, convinced that you are on the right track. The body is thrown into a dilemma. It doesn’t have Hamlet’s choice of ‘to be or not to be, it has to be! It has to run. But it doesn’t have its natural fuel - sugar glucose. There is no glycogen left. It scrambles around and gratefully grasps at the proteins. Converting protein into amino acids is within its powers, but to convert protein into sugar­glucose needs all its ingenuity. Nevertheless, it ploughs on manfully, putting all its worth into this tough task. Since it is beyond its natural powers, it uses up so much water, that even if you drink massive amounts of liquids, you will not be able to replace what’s lost. The lack of water puts a strain on your kidneys and liver. At this point, you can get constipated or dehydrated or feel weak. Or all three. Yet, your weighing machine dutifully records a lower weight because you’ve lost more water.

If you persist with your diet, the body is driven into a comer. Its state is pitiful. It has no sugar-glucose, no glycogen, no protein. It is already weak from having lost water. It is forced to press the emergency button. Like starving men marooned for months on a dessert island, the body turns into a ravenous cannibal. It begins feeding on itself - the muscle tissues. It starts the long, slow process of breaking it down into glucose. The lean muscle tissue disintegrates. Now, since you’ve lost water as well as lean muscle tissue, your weight drops lower. You may rejoice about this loss. Even as you read these words, you may shrug. As far as you are concerned, it’s a small price to pay. Your mirror shows a slimmer reflection so what does it matter what you’ve lost? Water, muscles, tissue, fat - they are all the same to you. Let these fitness freaks babble away. You are the monarch gloating over your throne-the weighing machine.

In reality, you have reached the cross-roads of your physical condition. There are two signposts here pointing to two paths in opposite directions. One reads: Continue your diet. The other: Stop your diet.

If you take the first street and continue to diet, you may pat yourself on the back for your immense will - power. But that won’t help if your destination is anorexia nervosa. Which is what you are heading for. It’s a street paved with unhealthy skeletal beings that just cannot eat even if they want to, They are shattered spirits obsessed totaily with not eating, Their nerves are a mess.

The second choice-to stop your diet- is wiser. But, here lies the irony of all that you’ve done. When you begin to eat normally - even undereat - the water returns to your body and, immediately, the weighing scales register this gain. At this stage, dieting is the last thing in your brain. You’ve just given it up. Disappointment looms large. All that weight you had starved off so painfully has come back in quick, large leaps and bounds. Such devastation leads you to that defiant stage where you help yourself liberally to biscuits, wafers, cakes, whatever. There’s one more shock in store for you. Your weight increases even more rapidly. Now, you weigh more than you did before you began your crash diet! How could that have happened?

To return to what we’ve been saying through this book - lean muscle tisslie burn fat. Your drastic diet has depleted them and made them ineffective. To restore and strengthen them will take time. Meanwhile, fat has no such restrictions. It enters your body and joins the stout army that is already there - making you fatter.

We’ve taken the axtreme example of a crash diet to show you how harmful it is to your health and how it only makes you put on more fat. The principle holds for any other diet with a few differences. Each one sets off a chain of imbalanced reactions that ultimately has you gaining weight after you’ve stopped dieting.

The high-protein diet makes you lose water. The fruit diet tears into your muscle tissue since fruits don’t contain enough proteins. And, above all, any diet that you undergo will have you straining at the seams of its strailjacket.

This may set you wondering. When you diet, why doesn’t your body use up fat for energy? Though it looks like it’s working against you in these circumstances, it is Nature’s way of ensuring your survival. The body is designed specifically to store fat - the army during peace time. To the body, war means a famine.

That is when fat is called to march out and fight for your body’s survival. When all other fuel has been used up, when no more food is forthcoming. It is during this crucial energy crisis that fat comes to your rescue.

In such a situation health in itself is not important - survival is. This wonderful of fat is what helps miners, trapped for weeks in a mine, to survive until they are rescued. Your body, however, cannot differentiate between a real-life situation and voluntary self-starvation. It reacts exactly the way it is meant to - keeping the fat resources as the last resort, the only way to survive.

In effect, fat cannot be dieted away. It’s like the fat cat who, when told by her doctor to diet, purred, “That’s wishful shrinking!” For, wishful-it is. Fat can only be burned off by aerobic exercising. That combined with sensible eating is the best way to maintain a fit, healthy you.

We hope you are stirred up by this insight into the workings of your body. It is designed for you. Now, it is up to you to feed and exercise it in the best, most enjoyable way to keep you fit and healthy.

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