I Hate to Say I Told You So

But, I told you so.

Another great article by Tom Venuto talks about metabolism and why starvation and crash diets are horribly harmful to firing up your metabolism and burn off that unwanted fat.

When you starve yourself, your body doesn't just immediately go into burning all the fat that you have. It actually starts eating away at muscle and other tissue in order to make it so that you don't need as many calories to maintain your system. You'll lose some weight (fat and muscle) but, at some point your body is going to come back into balance and you'll hit a weight loss plateau. But now, lets say that instead of your body needing 1000 calories to maintain what it needs to do throughout the day, it only needs 750 calories (i'm just using random numbers here. there's nothing special about 1000 and 750).

So you reach the plateau, get frustrated, and say screw it and grab a doughnut. The problem now is that your metabolism has been decreased your daily calorie needs from 1000 to 750 to maintain it's processes. That means, if you go back to eating the way you were before the crash diet, you are not only going to put the weight back on but also put on additional weight.

Let's use a real life example using 1000 and 750 calories. It took your body 1000 calories to maintain all it has to do through the day before the diet. Let's say you only got that many calories in for the day (and by the way, I would never recommend someone eat only 1000 calories a day). so you were maintaining your weight. Then you went on the starvation diet and after a few weeks, your body only needs 750 calories to maintain. You get frustrated and go back to eating the way you did before the crash diet (1000 calories a day). But, your body only needs 750 calories a day to maintain itself, and that means the extra 250 calories that you're consuming are turning into fat. Which means, that within a couple of weeks, you will not only have gained the weight back that you lost, but you'll start to put on more weight. Not good.

But, the article explains that to get out of this cycle

It may take a little longer if you have really messed things up with severe
starvation dieting in the past, especially if you've lost a lot of lean body
mass, but it is never hopeless. Anyone can increase their metabolism.

He then goes into some great tips on how to get your metabolism fired up again. NOTE to current and former clients of my Lean Body Fat Loss Plan. Any of these sound familiar?

• Meal frequency: eat 5-6 small meals per day
• Meal timing: eat approximately every 3 hours, with a substantial breakfast and a substantial post workout meal.
• Sufficient Caloric Intake: maintain a small calorie deficit and avoid starvation-level diets (suggested safe levels for fat loss: 2100-2500 calories per day for men, 1400-1800 calories per day for women; adjust as needed)
• Food choices: Select natural, unprocessed foods with high thermic effect (lean proteins like chicken, turkey, egg whites and fish are highly thermic, as are all green vegetables, salad vegetables and other fibrous carbs)
• Cardio training: Push up the intensity a bit if you really want to get a metabolic boost. Walking and low intensity cardio is fine, but higher intensity is more metabolism-stimulating
• Weight training: The basic exercises that include the largest muscle groups or even call into play the entire body as a unit (squats, front squats, split squats, deadlifts, stiff legged deadlifts, overhead presses, all kinds of rows and core-activation exercises) will have a much greater metabolism stimulating effect than isolation exercises (concentration curls, calf raises, etc)

Hmmmmm. Sounds pretty close to what I try to drill into the people that do my plan. So take that under advisement, I'm not just pulling your leg.

Finally, he states:

Consistency is the key.
Nothing will undermine the "re-building" of
your metabolism like inconsistency. If you stop and start, or skip meals and
workouts often, you will not even get off the ground.

And that pretty much sums it up. Don't kid yourself into thinking that you can fool your body by eating junk food and skipping workouts or eating great on the weekdays and then completely blowing it on the weekends. Stop making excuses.

You can lie to yourself all you want that "it's okay" but, your body isn't going to fall for it. It's your body, and it can be whatever it is that you want to make of it.

www.leanbodyfitness.com