What if I told you that very low calorie diets will actually make you fatter in the long term, and that there’s an almost embarrassingly simple way that you can eat more and still burn more fat?
Have you ever been told that to get a lean body you had to eat 1200 calories or even a 1000 calories a day or even less?
Did you ever just get FED UP with no results and tell yourself, “That’s it, I’ll just limit anything I eat with No Treats,” because you were desperate to get the pounds off as fast as possible?
Yeah, so it worked in the beginning, because there’s a HUGE calorie deficit at first, but there’s also a HUGE misconception:
When you cut your calories too far, eventually YOUR BODY ADAPTS.
Your body doesn’t care that you want to look good in a swimsuit. When your body figures out what’s going on it thinks you’re under attack, like your starving to death!
When you fire something extreme at your body (like hardly eating), your metabolic rate slows down in order to protect you.
This “defense mechanism” is often called, “the starvation response.”
Here are 5 of the consequences when your body goes into starvation mode:
1. Your body releases fewer fat-releasing and fat-burning enzymes such as hormone sensitive lipase and lipoprotein lipase.
2. Your fat cells release less of the hormone leptin, which is the signal that tells your brain you are well fed and not starving (it’s the “anti-starvation” hormone)
3. Fat burning hormones crash, including your levels of T3 (no, not the latest Arnold terminator movie, T3 is the active form of thyroid hormone, the important “metabolism-regulating hormone” that you’ve probably heard about before).
4. You lose muscle. Muscle is metabolically-active tissue, which means it takes a lot of energy just to keep it. When you’re “starving,” you’re in an “engery crisis”, so excess muscle is the LAST thing you need. Muscle becomes expendable, and your body cannibalizes your own lean tissue.
5. Appetite hormones go ballistic. When you’re starving, a part of your brain called the hypothalamus switches into high gear and flips the appetite switch, sometimes to the point where you become literally insane and cannot fight these physiological cravings with willpower.
Bottom line: It’s hormonally, metabolically and physiologically impossible to achieve permanent fat loss by starving yourself.
In the long run, very low calorie diets can actually make you fatter. Eventually, they lead to binge eating and weight re-gain and you end up with less muscle and a slower metabolism than when you started.
The good news is, you don’t have to starve yourself to get a lean body.
Here are 4 “BURN THE FAT” Action Steps:
1. Avoid very low calorie diets.
Avoid all diets!
2. Make sure your calories are customized.
If a diet program recommends the same amount of calories for everyone; that should be a red flag to stay away. It could be perfect for someone else, but starve you to death… literally.
3. Decrease calories just a little below maintenance.
Decrease your calories conservatively – only about 20% below your daily maintenance level. A mild calorie cut doesn’t trigger the starvation response as much. For example: If you’re female and you maintain your weight on 2150 calories per day, a 20% deficit is 1720 calories per day (correct). Conventional diets might have you slash to 1000 or 1200 calories per day or less without emphasis on exercise (incorrect).
4. Increase activity
If you only cut calories slightly below maintenance, then how do you reduce body fat without the process taking forever? Simple, you BURN more calories and increase your deficit by increasing your activity.
First, if you’re not doing so already, you should aim for three days per week of strength training with weights.
Second, you should do at least three days per week of moderate to vigorous cardiovascular exercise.
Third, if you wish to accelerate fat loss more, or if you need to break a progress plateau, you bump up your activity even further by adding additional cardio sessions or increasing the intensity or duration of your current workouts.
It also helps to get more physical activity in general, or participate in sports or recreational activities that you enjoy.
Bottom line:
The first secret to permanent fat loss is to BURN THE FAT, don’t STARVE THE FAT
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