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Keep pushing yourself ... you won't weigh less if you eat less.

Eat less, weigh less. Simple? Not quite, writes Nick Galvin.

Losing weight is simple in principle. The rule of thumb has been that if you cut out 2100 kilojoules a day - the equivalent of two large lattes or a blueberry muffin - you will lose about half a kilo a week until you reach that magic number on the scales.

Simple - but, as it turns out, probably way too simple.

It now appears that dietitians, doctors and others may have been getting it wrong all these years. There's a lot more to losing weight than just kilojoules in/kilojoules out.

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Losing weight ... just reducing your food intake is not enough.

When you start to lose weight, your body slows down your metabolism. In other words, you use less energy for the same activities.

This reaction has its roots in our primitive past, says Professor Michael Cowley, director of the Monash Obesity & Diabetes Institute. "If you go on a diet, your body says, 'Aha, here is a famine', and it decreases energy expenditure, so you need less energy just to stay at that weight," he says. "This is probably because we evolved in conditions where famine was frequent, and if you had an appropriate physiological response to famine, you were more likely to survive and your genes got propagated."

The result is that if you stay on the same reduced-kilojoule diet, over time the gap between kilojoules in and kilojoules out narrows. In a paper published last year in The Lancet, researchers from the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) found that for a given weight-loss goal, half the loss would occur in the first year, but the remaining kilos would take another two years to lose.

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The diet dilemma

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