Metabolic Damage We all know someone who eats next to nothing but still can’t lose weight, or does excessive amounts of exercise and can’t drop any more kilos. Have you, or someone you know gone on a low calorie fad diet? You may have lost a good deal of weight ~ 5, 10 or 15kgs? Great! Good job, but once the diet is done with you’ve put it all back on in a short amount of time? Right? Or even put more weight on than you had in the first place? If so, this may be due to metabolic damage. Metabolic damage is when your metabolism becomes so repressed it adapts to either a super low calorie intake or high-energy output and your body basically becomes unable to burn body fat. Your body has a set body fat level it likes to sit at. This is called homeostasis. When your fat index falls below this your metabolism basically does everything it can to get back to its set point. When your body fat stores drop below their optimum level your body goes into survival mode and in turn will lower your metabolic rate and also lower your energy output. The problem is when people finish their diet they generally tend to binge. And binge hard. How many times have you seen someone finish a strict diet then the week after eat anything and everything they can? This can lead your metabolism into creating more adipocytes (fat cells), which will give a greater potential to store even more body fat than before. Research shows that after a short period of dieting it usually takes just as long as you dieted for your metabolism to get back to normal ~ so you diet for twelve weeks, it will take around twelve weeks for your metabolism to get back to where it was prior to beginning the diet. The fix to metabolic damage is reverse dieting ~ slowly adding calories (as little as 20-100cals/week) over time to increase your metabolic capacity. Your goal when dieting should always be to eat as much as possible while still losing weight. Repeat: Your goal when dieting should always be to EAT AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE while still losing weight! Dieting shouldn’t mean starving yourself, or limiting yourself to two meals a day of chicken breast and broccoli. Give yourself enough time to diet down and don’t let your eating blow out once your diet is done. “I lost 10kgs in 8 weeks, but now I’ve put it all back on”. What’s the point? If your goal is sustained weight loss, then plan for it. I don’t believe you should ever go on a diet you cannot continue for the rest of your life. Being healthy is a lifestyle, not a fad diet.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 08:34:59 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015