She started out like most people do when they begin a diet, consuming fewer calories each day than she initially consumed before the diet. She worked hard at the gym and put this plan into action for a few months. Once she was happy with her weight, she began eating the same way she had before starting the diet and within a few weeks she regained all her weight. The question is why? Well, dieting may seem like the answer, but the truth is that dieting will lead to failure and worsen a person's health. You can follow your diet perfectly, so how is it possible for someone to gain all their weight back and sometimes even more? One of the reasons it is difficult to maintain weight is that there is metabolic overcompensation for weight loss. If you decrease your body mass by ten percent, you would expect your metabolic rate to decrease by ten percent, but it actually slows down more, by about eleven to fifteen percent (Gretchen 2). To put it more simply, dieting reduces basal metabolic rate, meaning you can live on less food. So when you go back to your normal diet, which was already too high, you will gain weight even faster than before and you will probably end up heavier than before the diet. This explains why people who diet more often can't lose weight for as long.