Archive for February, 2010
Starve Your Body For Slower Weight Loss
Part 2 of Starving Yourself to Lose Weight is Dangerous
The liver stores enough glycogen to provide energy for a single day. So if the starvation diet goes past that one day, the body turns to muscle as a back up source of energy. That’s correct, the body will use muscle to produce the glucose it needs as energy. That slowly reduces your overall amount of muscle yet it is the amount of muscle you have, that sets the rate at which calories are burned. The more muscle wasted to create glucose, the slower your body becomes at burning calories. Starve your body of required calories and you will have just lowered your metabolic rate.
Those quick 2 or 3 day diets claiming to burn only fat…? They only burn away metabolically active muscle tissue… Starve yourself for about a week and you WILL lose weight: 30 percent from muscle and the rest from fluid loss. That is not how to lose weight. Burning fat is tricky!
Now, muscle has the ability to burn calories even while the body is resting and inactive – it consumes energy just to maintain its own mass. By reducing the amount of muscle you have, starvation dieting becomes detrimental to the body’s calorie burning efficiency.
–continued tomorrow–
Aden
Starving Yourself to Lose Weight is Dangerous
I’ve been saying that dieting is stressful on the body and that staying fit while you lose weight is important. Before starting any diet, it is important to be aware of the potential dangers that may come about as a direct result. Case in point is what is known as a starvation diet.
Although it is of short duration, it is very demanding on the body. It has nothing that I would recommend.
Maybe it is because of our obsession with quick fixes that this practice is accepted as a way to lose weight quickly. Before you consider trying to starve yourself thin, read on.
The body needs a certain amount of calories to carry out its most basic of functions. Cut back too much -starve yourself- and you will put your body under undo stress by forcing too great of a demand on its own reserves for energy. If continued for a length of time, your energy will be drained, the immune system compromised, and bodily stress heightened past a reasonable level. That is a price too high to pay for weight loss. Keep it a healthy weight loss, over time. Forget the miracle pill and quick fix weight loss ideas.
The celebrity style starvation diets that claim a 10 pound weight loss in two days are recipes for weight loss rebound. Weight off, then weight back on. You’ve wasted your time. These diets cause weight loss through large fluid loss, not fat loss. Temporary weight loss… all you did was stress your body needlessly.
Because the body needs glucose as the main energy source, these restrictive diets utilize reserves of glucose stored in the liver as glycogen. When the glycogen is broken down into glucose for energy, water is lost, causing a rapid, but false weight loss. The glycogen stores will be replenished along with the water when you return to your normal diet. What happens next is that you will return to your previous weight or higher.
You have to stay hydrated in order to function at a reasonable level! So, don’t go for weight loss based upon losing water.
–continued tomorrow–
Aden
Real Food – Is it Good For You?
In researching what to have as another post here, I encountered this video. In it, author Nina Planck talks about her book, Real Food, and gives her views on a variety of food myths. The book has been out a couple of years now. I thought you might want to hear what she has to say.
Real Food: What to Eat and Why
real food – what to eat and why
Nina Planck discusses her book