Velma Garnes, Fitness Instructor, Focused-Fitness.org
This is essentially starvation. Your body needs a certain number of calories just to cover your basal metabolic rate (BMR) in order to function. This does NOT include daily activities, or intentional exercise. This number (usually you can hit the ballpark if you just take your weight and multiply it by 1000, or just add a zero to your weight in pounds, ex: if you weigh 120, then you should consume 1200 calories just to cover your BMR) is an indication of how much you should consume, just to cover living, breathing, or sitting on the couch. This is for basic human function. Eating has a thermic affect on the body.
If you choose to eat less, you will lose weight, but there are some other information you need to arm yourself with in order to make sure it’s the kind of weight you seek to lose. Here’s what I mean:
If the scale says you weigh less, that does NOT necessarily mean you are doing the right thing.
Here’s why…..
THE TRUTH: Eat less weigh less does 3 things:
1. You lose water.
2. You lose very little fat.
3. You lose lots of muscle.
Let me explain further…..
When starving several things happen:
- Your body goes for the metabolically active tissue – muscle.
- It goes into survival mode, and the way it survives is by eating your muscle–it stores fat because that’s how it can survive the longest. Your remarkable body doesn’t know that fat loss is your goal or what you’re trying to do so it seeks for the way it will preserve itself the longest. It wants to help you survive your self-imposed starvation.
- In the meantime, your body continually catabolizes itself (muscle).
- If muscle is eliminated, then it can survive on fewer calories, preserving itself.
- Low-cal diets have no real lifetime affect-it makes you worse off in the long run. It catabolizes your muscle until your brain decides that you will provide it with the necessary nutrition it needs in order to stop feeding on your precious muscle.
- Your body goes into an unhealthy state, driving you to the quickest energy nutrients it needs to survive: FAT & SUGAR! This is a vicious cycle. Your job is to take yourself out of this cycle by first stop starving yourself, and second, ELIMINATE THE SUGAR!
Muscle is good!
• The scale cannot differentiate between fat, muscle, bone, water, the last meal you just ate, clothing, or your internal organs – it simply sums it all up and gives you the grand total. It is how much gravity is pulling on your body at that point and time. The method that gives you the most information is a body caliper test, or body fat test which determines your body fat percentage. This gives you the percentage of fat you have on your body so you can figure out your lean muscle mass. A healthy range for a woman would be between 18 – 23%, Men are between 12 – 15%. You want this number to be low, but your lean body mass (LBM) to be high. You want your body composed of as much LBM as possible.
• Muscle does not weigh more than fat. A pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat. The difference is that muscle takes up far less space on the body than fat and is far more appealing than a pound of fat on your body.
• If you lose weight and the weight loss is primarily muscle, the “loss” will be short lived and unhealthy, provided that your goal is to maintain muscle which is the only site where fat can be burned from your body.
• If seeing the # rise on the scale is stressful to you, get rid of the scale. The muscle that you are working to feed and build will begin to do it’s job by burning off the fat on your body. Build the muscle first! Then watch as the fat seems to effortlessly melt from your body.
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