I know that Dukan means you don't need to count calories but I use an app to keep track of everything - so when I started Dukan I carried on. I noticed that in the beginning I was only eating 750-950 cals a day - so prefer to track them to ensure I get as close to 1200minimum as possible.
And of course the more exercise you do - the more calories you need to ensure you are up to your minimum intake.
Just a thought.
Absolutely!
Alessandra - one of the things you have to realise is from the neck down your body has no idea you are trying to lose weight. Your body is still living in the bush 50,000 years ago, and if you reduce your food intake to under 1500 calories, over a long period, it doesn't think "Ooo - I'm going to be thin" it thinks "OMG! There is a shortage of food - I'm going to starve to death" -
And if you then exercise while not eating enough it thinks "I'm running more to try and catch a meal. and still starving! I am in serious danger! Switch to famine mode!"
Your body's only job, in that situation, is to keep you alive until the food comes back - so it becomes incredibly efficient at storing every single calories, sacrificing everything else - even muscle - before it will shed fat.
And when the food comes back - it will gleefully say "Oh Good - we survived - now I must store as much fat as possible so if we ever have another famine, I have a couple of months worth of spare fat on my arse to live on".
This is why extremely low food intake can actually sometime make weight loss harder - and almost guarantee weight gain when the diet finishes.
This is why when the Dukan diet says "protein is unlimited" it means exactly that - to stop the dieter triggering a starvation response.
Its also why conso is so long - to gradually increase the amount of energy dense foods like carbs and fat without triggering the bodies fat storing survival mechanism.
