Most diets exhaust you because they demand constant mental effort on top of already stressful lives. Chess grandmaster Mikhail Antipov burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting, comparable to Roger Federer playing tennis. Monitoring calories, making food decisions, and exercising self-control burns real energy, draining you within days.
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Playing high level chess causes players to burn calories at an athletic rate. For example, 21 year old grandmaster Mikhail Antipov was recorded burning 560 calories in just two hours of sitting, roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of single tennis. Most dieters are already kind of up to here with life. Frustrated. You're stressed out, you're working hard, you're constantly on the go, you have no time for yourself, you're overwhelmed, your cortisol levels are high, right? He said, I got to change my weight. I'm going to go on a diet. Now, you tell me what diet you're going into that doesn't massively boost your cognitive load. From Weight Watchers to intermittent fasting. A lot of people don't think of thinking as a physical thing, but literally thinking is burning your energy up. And so when you go into these intense diets where you're micromanaging every other thing and controlling yourself and forcing yourself, you're just burning through your energy. And so this is why usually you start the diet, you do it for a couple days and then you feel this dip in energy. You're not imagining it. It's not an illusion. There's not. It's not a surprise. It's because you're drastically burning energy.