Starvation Diets Don’t Work

Starvation Diets Don’t Work…Eat Small Frequent Meals

Starvation diets or eating only one meal per day is not the solution to losing weight. This will slow your metabolism down and make it harder to lose fat. To speed up your metabolism, exercise aerobically, eat small meals, and eat frequently. Three to six small meals are preferred to one or two big meals a day. Eating frequently teaches the body that there is no need to store fat for future energy.

Losing more than two pounds of fat per week for most people is impossible. What about those ten pounds you lost on a hot day during practice? On the scale you were ten pounds lighter. However little, if any, of that loss was from fat. Where did the ten pounds come from? It came from your muscles.

Your muscles are primarily composed of water. When you sweat you lose water. As soon as you consume any fluid it returns to the muscle. There is only a trace of water in fat. Fat is a gooey, oily substance.

Wearing a rubber suit and sitting in a sauna causes you to sweat, not lose fat. The water lost comes from muscles — not fat. It is a temporary loss and will eventually be replaced when you hydrate.

A scale will only tell you how much weight you lost. It will not tell you how much of that weight loss was fat, muscle, or water. More important than your body weight is your percent body fat. What percentage of your body weight is fat?

The only reliable method to measure body fat is to cut you open and scoop out the fat and weigh it. Several less radical methods can be used to measure body fat, but most aren’t very reliable. Instead of cutting you open we suggest you strip naked and look in the mirror. If you see any excess fatty deposits you should lose weight (fat).

What difference does it make if your body fat is 14% or 15%? The key is how you lose the weight (fat). Proper eating habits and regular exercise is the prescription.

Diets Don’t Work.

If any one diet worked there wouldn’t be any fat people. Instead of dieting try monitoring your eating and exercise habits for the rest of your life.
Observe the definitions given for the word diet: limiting intake of food, fast, abstinence from food, starvation. Each of these terms is a temporary condition. Losing weight is difficult. It’s easier to maintain a certain body weight. The message? Don’t gain any excess weight.

Diets don’t work. Most people regain the weight lost within six months. Losing fat requires patience. You cannot rush the process. Do not lose more than two pounds per week. A smaller person will find it difficult to lose one pound of fat per week.

You can go on a starvation diet and lose five pounds in a week. You may have lost a pound or two of fat, but the additional weight loss is muscle and water. Remember a muscle is 72% water. If you don’t take in enough calories your body will use some fat and then begin using protein (muscle) for energy. Eventually you’ll gain this weight back and then some.

Starvation diets slow the metabolism down. This will make it easier to gain more weight when you stop dieting.