Whether you're in search of a way to lose weight quickly, or you have simply become frustrated with the slow progress of your weight loss, starvation diets should be out of the question. They're torturous, unhealthy and actually work against you. Your body needs fuel, and it will get it from what's at hand. Healthy weight loss encourages the burning of fat, while starvation diets give your body no choice but to destroy beneficial muscle mass, leaving the fat behind.
Starvation Diets
Starvation diets severely restrict calories -- usually to the tune of 800 or less. What constitutes a starvation diet depends on your body and your lifestyle -- a normal calorie intake for a sedentary 75-year old woman would be considered a starvation diet for a 22-year old male bodybuilder. While taking in fewer calories is the key to weight loss, going too low triggers less-than-optimal responses from your body.
The Wrong Response
When you combine a modest caloric deficit -- say, 500 calories per day -- with moderate exercise, your body breaks into your fat stores to find fuel. If the calorie deficit becomes too extreme, your body doesn't have enough ready energy to work with. But it wants to hold onto the energy-rich fat, because it doesn't know when more fuel might be available. So instead of burning fat, your body begins feeding on muscle mass. On top of that, your body begins using less energy to do things in an attempt to conserve energy, so you burn fewer calories throughout the day.
Muscle vs. Fat
Losing muscle slows your dieting efforts. Muscle burns calories just to exist -- it requires energy to work and move, and that energy comes from food. Fat, on the other hand, does nothing. It's dead weight. So as your body eats away at your muscle mass, you end up with a lower percentage of calorie-burning muscle and a higher percentage of dead-weight fat. You may weigh less overall, but your body fat percentage is higher. The result is that your body burns even fewer calories overall, no matter what you're doing.
Recovering
Starvation diets are unsustainable, so as soon as you begin eating normally, your body will continue to burn calories slowly, even though you'll be taking more in. Anything you don't burn gets stored as fat. To return to your normal calorie burn, you must build back the muscle mass that you lost and sometimes even more. It's a long process, and it may never return to normal. If you repeat this process over and over, your rate of calorie burn slows even more until it becomes very difficult for you to burn calories, making it harder to lose fat.
Member Comments