Starving your body will strip weight!!
Free Fitness Blog-Posted by Personal Trainer Mike Evans – www.mefit.com.au
Hi YouFitMEFIT’s,
Yes, your body will lose weight…although it will be through muscle break down + water and a little stored fat. Remembering when you get over feeling starved and deprived and or perhaps start to break down with sickness. We normally start eating or over eating once again and the body has been in starvation mode and stores energy as fat for when we go into starvation mode in future. Yo-yoing up and down with high body fat % and weight. (not happy Jan)
Take a few mins and read more on the MEFIT Personal Training Sutherland Shire way’s of diet plan to help tone up/loss weight then maintain!!! Oh yeh
Whenever we talk about weight loss, toning up we are really talking about creating a caloric deficit.
So if we take a look at this picture for a moment you will see that on one side of the scales we have food intake, which includes all food and liquids and on the other side we have energy expenditure, which is made up of your Basal Metabolic Rate (how many calories a day your body uses just to maintain itself), Thermogenesis (how many calories your body uses to convert the food you eat into usable energy) as well as your daily activity, both planned and incidental.
So when your food intake is greater than your energy expenditure, you gain weight. When your energy expenditure is greater than your food intake you lose weight and when they are both the same you maintain weight.
So looking at this model of weight loss/toning up, most people attempt to lose weight/tone up by simply restricting their food intake in an attempt to make their food intake less than their energy expenditure so that they will lose weight.
The problem we need to be aware of is that if you reduce your food intake too low (generally anything less than 1200 calories per day), your body will start to shed your lean muscle and water as well as body fat; so when you stop the diet your metabolism (which is what is responsible for how many calories a day your body uses) is actually slower than when you started your diet.
The reason for this is that your body is made up of Lean Muscle, Body Fat and Water. Muscle is what is called ‘active tissue’ which means it requires energy on a daily basis just to maintain itself. Fat, on the other hand, is inactive and just sits there waiting to be used one day as energy. So when your body thinks it is at risk of going into famine (it’s not getting enough food) its survival instinct is to keep your fat stores and instead burn off your muscle so that you can survive for longer on fewer calories.
This is why it’s so important to keep a food and activity diary, so that we can ensure we are creating a caloric deficit without triggering this survival response in your body.
Now it is really important to understand the difference between weight-loss and fat-loss because not all weight is equal when it comes to measuring your results just by the number on the scales. Muscle is much denser and heavier than fat; if you are losing muscle it may look good on the scales but it’s actually doing you an injustice as it will make it more and more difficult to maintain that weight-loss.
On the flip side, if you are actually including strength training, and or cardio training at MEFIT Gym Sutherland Shire or MEFIT’s Online personal training as part of your weight-loss/ toning up program, which I certainly encourage, then
building lean muscle (which helps increase your metabolism) will not accurately display how much body-fat you have actually lost simply by standing on the scales.
Let me explain. You may gain 500g of muscle and lose 1kg of body fat (which will make you leaner) but the scales will only show a loss of 500g. So measuring yourself and using your clothes, in addition to weighing yourself, is the best way to truly measure successful fat/weight-loss.
So when you are preparing your weekly food and activity diary, make sure you are planning (and doing) enough exercise and activity so that you can tip the energy expenditure scales in your favour.
NOTE: there is a little more to it than the above...but this way of structuring your diet/exercise plan is a great start to toning up for spring + losing those last few kg’s of fat!!!!
Ciao ciao!
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