29/01/2018
What happens when you go on a Low calorie diet
Low calorie dieting slows your metabolism, making it more difficult to lose weight and keep it off. Since the body isn’t getting enough food, it starts to break down its own fat and protein stores to get energy. It is important to hold onto lean muscle as it increases your basal metabolic rate. On a Low calorie diet about half the weight lost is fat and the other half is muscle.
The failure rate of most diets is high, yet people continue to try one after another, always hoping that the next one will provide the answer. Dieting fails due to a combination of hormonal changes, muscle loss, and frustration. When faced with a shortage of calories, your body’s natural response is to hold onto fat. This mechanism may have come in handy for your ancestors trying to survive a famine, but the “starvation response” makes life difficult for a dieter.
If you persist long enough with the low calorie diet, the body begins to break down muscle tissue for fuel. This missing muscle can wreak havoc on your metabolism for a long time. Muscle is metabolically active tissue. It requires a certain number of calories each day to maintain itself. Therefore, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn even when you’re just sitting around. As your muscle mass drops, so does your daily calorie requirement.
Most dieters eventually return to their old eating habits. When this happens, the weight inevitably is put back on. What happens next is that while they lost both muscle and fat during the diet, what they put back on will be all fat. So, even though they may weigh the same as they did when they started, they now have a lot more fat and a lot less muscle than they did before the diet. This means that their metabolism is slower and their calorie requirements are lower. Even if they return to their pre-diet eating habits, they still require fewer calories a day due to the muscle loss. That’s one reason dieters are prone to regaining all of the lost weight and then some.
The answer to this problem is an active lifestyle that includes a weight training program, and a healthy diet. A healthy diet is based around, fresh fruits and vegetables, good fats and lean protein. A healthy diet is realistic and permanent; not something you suffer through.
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