Starve yourself skinny stupidity

Have you ever found yourself staring down at the scales, waiting to give yourself a big pat on the back for your achievements over the past week, only for them to let you down? To see the needle settle and realise you have lost 1lb instead of the 7lbs you feel you deserve. It’s heartbreaking. But we have all experienced it at some point.

The problem with people starting out on a diet is often that they simply have not been educated on what to expect or how the body works. People expect miraculous shift in weight over a period of a few weeks. When in fact their target weight will not be reached for some months.

And it is often this that causes people to get disheartened and give up.

When trying to lose weight people often believe there is just two ways to lose fat rapidly.

1. To starve themselves skinny (cutting calorie intake by obscene amounts)
2. To use a fad diet such as Atkins (unbalancing the bodies dietary intake causing it to use energy sources from different sources)

The problem is this. NEITHER OF THESE METHODS WILL WORK.

On paper these two methods look pretty convincing as most people believe that the average human body is capable of burning up 2000(ish) calories a day at rest, and they know by cutting calories they loose weight.

So is it not plausible that by eating nothing, your using up 2000 calories from stored fat? Yes?

So far, so good? However the answer to that question is a resounding NO!

The body is more intelligent than we can ever imagine. It has evolved to survive all sorts of things the world can throw at it. One being famine.

A person’s metabolism (calorie burning) is determined by 3 factors:

1. Lifestyle – how active you are day to day, for example, a builder is going to use up far more calories than a telephone sales assistant.
2. Genetics – Body type, some people are more susceptible to weight gain than others, however this does not mean they have to be overweight.
3. Muscle mass – Muscle is the body’s fat burning engine, the more muscle a person has the more calories they can burn in a day.

So. Famine? Whatever were we on about?

Basically the body has a defence against starvation called ‘Survival Mode’. This happens when we consume under 1300-1400 calories per day over a period of several days. This means when food is scarce you stay alive for longer. It works by switching over the way your body works. Instead of your muscles burning up calories and stored fat for energy. The body STORES MORE FAT and breaks down your muscle tissue for fuel.

This way it is winning two ways in the fight against famine. You have more stored fat to live off when the food completely runs out, and you now have less muscle to burn it all off. This is particularly deceiving on the scales as muscle weighs considerably more than fat. Not to mention the fact that you now have less muscle to burn off what you DO eat when food becomes available again. So you have effectively gone backwards, and may end up fatter then you were at the start of this ludicrous decision.

So… we are beating this famine! We are not going to die just yet! Success!

Or it would be, were there actually a famine! But there is not is there? You’re just trying to starve yourself skinny and failing! Yes you may now be lighter on the scales due to your decrease in muscle, but that is not a good thing. Chop a leg off and you weigh less, but do you now have a flatter stomach? No!

The human body can survive for longer than people think without food. If it could only last a mere few weeks on all of it’s stored fat than wouldn’t all Muslims die whilst fasting during Ramadan?

I know your probably thinking in the back of your head ‘if you can’t starve yourself skinny then what is going on in these third world countries’. You are onto something if you are thinking this, but you are probably missing the point I am trying to make. YES you CAN starve and get skinny… Eventually! But it will take months of eating nothing at all and feeling like sh*t. You and I both know you will give up before you get anywhere fast. You have access to food everyday and will power alone will not carry through your plans to stave to the edges of death. Not to mention the health implications this will bring.

The thing we have to realise is that to be slim we must change out lifestyle, not just go on a diet for a few weeks then revert back to what we were eating before hand. If we are overweight we are overweight for a reason, and that reason is simply eating more than we burn off. If we use a fad diet to drop a few pounds then go back to eating the same things that made us fat in the first place we will once again end up fat. Is this not a fair point? You can paint a red wall blue, but if you revert back to the red paint that wall is going to end up red again.

Fad diets are what celebrities use to drop a few pounds for a movie or a photo shoot, in a limited amount of time. They are not a long-term solution to weight loss. Yes you can use fad diets to squeeze into that tuxedo/dress for a special occasion, but they simply do no not work as a long-term weight loss plan.

Basically, we must eat right and exercise regular. It’s that simple! Weight loss does not have to be as complicated as everybody makes out. You don’t need special gimmicks or diet food with an expensive brand name. Just make sure you make your own food from scratch. Cook fresh vegetables and potatoes etc. Anything that comes in a fancy package or can be micro-waved in 10 minutes, is full of hidden preservatives and more often than not full of sodium (salt).

Excessive salt is bad for your blood pressure and for your heart. It is also good at making the body retain water. Which leaves us looking bloated. It is recommended we take in no more than 6g of salt per day.

Processed food such as ready meals should not be consumed on a day to day basis as part of a healthy lifestyle. They are ok as occasional substitutes if you simply do not have the time to cook anything properly. But the word processed is the problem. Anything processed is bad. Processing takes most of the goodness out of the food then other unnecessary things are added in.

Things such as white bread and white pasta seem good, but the milling process changes the way the body processes such things and all of the goodness is lost. The body needs carbohydrates for energy. We have what are called complex carbohydrates, and simple (or refined) carbohydrates. Without going too in depth. Carbohydrates in food that grows in the land contains complex carbohydrates. Ready meal manufacturers process these and they go through a milling process, turning them into simple (or refined) carbohydrates. The body processes simple carbohydrates as SUGAR, not carbohydrates… and this is a BIG DEAL! The same goes for sugar. Fructose present naturally in fruit is nowhere near as bad for you as refined sugar in chocolate bars and sweets.

The problem most people have is patience. They expect results fast and I’m afraid these things will take time. Think back to when you were slimmer, and see how long it took you to get to where you are. People do not get fat over night, therefore you cannot expect to lose it all over night.

There is roughly 3500 calories in 1 pound of stored body fat. This means you must burn off an extra 3500 from diet and exercise before that one little dropped needle mark on the scales has come from fat.  So if you drop 500 calories out of your diet and eat around 1500 calories from clean food (and by this I mean decent meals not 3 or 4 bars of chocolate), and burn off an extra 500 calories from an hour at the gym then you’ve effectively burned 1000 calories in one day. This means 3 days later you have dropped roughly 1pound of body fat.

So you see, 2lbs a week is about the norm for weigh loss. You will find you might lose 7lbs, this extra weight will have come from fluids, 7lbs will not all have come from fat. It is important to realise this as people can drop huge amounts in week 1 and 2, then they loose just 1lb in week 3 and 4 and they think its pointless this is not working anymore.

You must be patient and you must be strong. These things take time but if you don’t enter the race you have no chance of winning. Even if you slip up (we all do) then start your diet again the next day. Its surely better to take a few steps backwards than carry on then to quit and start all over again from the beginning at a later date.