Research that looked at the brain's response to crash dieting showed that sometimes your brain and your intention to lose weight are not working in synch. Often the brain's reaction to a severe change in diet is to try to restore the balance by sending more and stronger hunger signals to the stomach. Researchers at the University of Alabama say that sudden diet changes to a much lower calorie eating plan or even protein only or carb only diets trigger off the brain's defence mechanism and send extra hunger signals to the stomach.

This can mean that the dieting can be much more painful and stressful than it needs to be and can lead to high levels of failure. The researchers identified the 2 different types of appetite or food desire patterns namely hedonic and metabolic. The first type is the type that is the desire for tasty and satisfying food, the sort of food that you dream about eating when you are really hungry. Often people who diet eat boring and tasteless food and this only serves to increase the hedonistic cravings for tasty food.

The brain's levels of dopamine and endorphins which control cravings can change meaning that the desire to eat certain things and specific foods is much increased. The advice from the researchers is to be careful of leaving out all of your favourite snacks and foods as this will create extreme cravings. The secret is to limit the amount of tasty food that you eat keeping well within the calorie limit set for your diet.

The other craving that occurs is the metabolic appetite type which is basically a desire for energy which comes from eating calories. Sudden reductions in calories  can cause great hunger and make you feel lethargic and stressed. When people get very hungry they tend to overeat when they finally get food and this obviously undermines the diet.

By being careful and sensible you can your brain to work in synch with your diet plans and weight loss goals. Firstly don't go crazy on the calorie reduction, keep it at about 1200 or a little more and you'll be using more calories than you take in especially if you exercise.

Don't restrict your diet to one type of food as this will cause excessive cravings for the other types that are left out. Keep up the exercise and you'll lose the weight faster and increase your metabolic rate which will in turn lessen the hunger pangs. Weight loss is most effective when exercise and diet work in tandem and just using one of them is not nearly as effective.

Be careful and be honest with yourself over portion sizes. If you put alot of your favorite foods in front of yourself you will find it difficult to stop eating them.