Sometimes we think we are so clever.
We think we can just fool our bodies into looking the way we want it to. It’s funny what people are willing to try just so that they can lose fat without having to exercise.
This is the lazy way to try to lose weight, and it doesn’t work for very long. Whether you’re trying to lose a lot of fat or just remove that stubborn bit of fat on your gut, you’d better read closely, because the same rules will apply.
Contrary to what you might be thinking, people don’t always become overweight simply because they are overeating – there’s more to the story than that. I remember feeling so surprised when I once talked to an overweight person who told me he never eats breakfast, and then only eats a small salad for lunch.
I remember thinking “Sheesh, I really feel bad for this guy. His genetics must be terribly unfair to him”. But then I started to notice that this was a common theme among many overweight people.
Yes, fat can be gained by overeating huge amounts of food all the time, but it can also be gained by eating less food and slowing your metabolism down. I’ll explain what this means.
It’s Not That Simple
Let me start off by saying that how much fat you have on your body is not simple math. If you keep your energy expenditure constant but you lower your calories, you’ll lose weight. So it seems that if you lowered your calories even more, you would lose even more weight… it’s simple math, right?
Well, actually it’s not simple math. Your body doesn’t know the rules of your little calorie calculations, and frankly, it doesn’t really want to follow them either. Your body worries about survival first, and when you don’t give it enough food, your body does what will help it to survive — it saves what you eat as fat.
This is because humans haven’t always lived in a world where food was so abundant. The human species has had to endure a world where food may or may not come on any given day… or even week for that matter.
If weight loss really were simple math, and people could really burn 10 pounds of fat every week forever, then humans wouldn’t have been able to survive the hunting and gathering days of our past. They would have all starved to death long ago.
Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for us), our bodies are smart enough to adapt to the amounts of food we give them. When we eat less food, our metabolism slows down so that we can survive off of less food.
So let’s take a look at what happens to us when we severely cut our calorie intake to lose fat:
1. Loss of fat, muscle, and water: This is the part of most diets that gets all the attention. You start your diet and you lose a whopping (more…)
Just starting out with weightlifting? Want to get bigger muscles this winter?
Get my full-body lifting routine here: FullBodyAttack!
Loading ...