Starvation diets are not your friends. They do not provide the proper amount of calories your body needs to function at peak performance and your body reacts to the situation by drawing on its reserves to provide the energy needed. This puts added stress on your body and is not the answer to permanent weight loss.
Let’s examine what happens when you adhere to a low-calorie diet when trying to achieve your permanent weight loss goals.
Ultra low-calorie diets:
- Kill your metabolism: your body goes on high alert when you deprive it of the fuel it needs to function properly, when you go on a starvation diet. Your starvation diet triggers it’s “famine” response mode and as such, its goes into survival mode. The amount of muscle your body has sets the metabolic rate. When muscle mass is lost, they perform less metabolic burn and save energy. The result is that your rate of weight loss slows down.
- Burn hard earned muscle mass, not body fat which can actually leave you more flabby.
- Cause physical weakness: Low calorie diets compromise your ability to maintain healthy and fight off disease.
- Corrode your concentrating abilities
- Open the door to nutritional deficiencies: you deprive your body of essential vitamins and minerals resulting in hair, nails and skin that show deterioration.
- Severely weaken your bones: ultra-low calorie fad diets can be dangerous for individuals with chronic diabetes as well as heart disease, liver or kidney disease, any infectious problem as well as pregnancy.
- Invite your body fat back as soon as you go off the low-calorie diet: most women who go on low calorie crash diets return with a vengeance and eat everything in sight and then some when they stop “dieting”.
It’s obvious that this is not the wise choice for long-term permanent weight loss. You may achieve your goal in the beginning, but most of that is water weight loss anyway.
In years past, health was not the primary objective…it was all about skinny, achieving that “model” skinny look. However times are changing and the great news is that radiating healthy, self-esteem and high levels of energy is what turns heads nowadays. Gaunt and skinny are finally giving way to strong, curving and sexy.
The true key to long-term weight loss is healthy eating habits (well established habits that endure long after you’ve lost the excess weight) and maintaining a regular work-out schedule that includes not only cardio but weight lifting/resistance training of some sort. Remember, strength training not cardio is the fastest route to changing your body.
This is not a quick-fix approach…nor something you are just trying to “make it through”…this is a way of living, a true lifestyle change that you will incorporate from the day you earnestly begin forward. Don’t overlook your support system.
Having family members actively supporting your efforts will help you get through the harder times and there will be harder times, those times when you just want to give up.
Support and resolve are the keywords in those tough spots…
A lean, healthy, vital machine is the result.
Remember, this is about long-term goals not about reaching some magical number on a scale. The important thing is body fat…that’s what matters.
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