DESPERATE TIMES, DESPERATE MEASURES For instance, let’s imagine your body burns 1,500 calories per day. When on a crash diet, the body, perceiving a threat to its very existence, will cause you to crave food. If you successfully make it through that check point, the body will next resort to lowering its metabolism, let’s say to 1,300 calories per day to conserve energy.
As time goes by, when you stubbornly hold on to your diet regime, the body feels the need to source out other fuel stores.
So another trick is to start dipping into your body’s muscle stores, and deplete them for energy. So you lose muscle! After a while, you finally come to the realisation that this is just not working out the way you wanted. You’re not looking or feeling good, and your fat stores are largely intact!
So, disheartened, you return to your normal eating patterns. Or possibly, even worse. Having been deprived of food for so long, it’s not unnatural to start bingeing.
Body weight now quickly increases in the form of fat, and not the muscle that has been depleted. Also, your metabolism will not rise again to 1,500 calories as in your pre-diet days, but will remain at 1,300 calories per day. This gives you a surplus of 200 calories per day, which will be stored as body fat.
Some of the most common fat collection sites for women are the lower belly, hips, inner and outer thighs, and triceps (back of the upper arms). For men, fat tends to stay focused around the middle and on the back. So now, these are the areas where this excess fat will build up. Having gained fat and cm in this way, after a certain period of time, one would typically get back onto another crash diet with renewed vigour and commitment.
At this stage: * Your metabolic rate will take another dive, eg from 1,300 to 1,100 calories. * Your body will start dipping into your remaining muscle stores for energy again. * Your fat stores will remain mostly intact. * Due to increased lipoprotein lipase activity (in layman’s language, the result here is that the body becomes more efficient at storing fat, which is triggered by crash dieting), we set the stage for gaining fat a lot faster when we come off the diet. Due to this, we get caught up in perpetual dieting.
When you get off your diet: * Your metabolic rate will remain at 1,100 calories per day, leaving you with a surplus of 200 calories, in addition to the 200 from the previous attempt. * Weight gained will be in the form of fat, and not the muscle that has been lost. * And so the cycle perpetuates itself.....
LISTEN UP In conclusion, every time you crash diet, you lose more and more muscle, drop your metabolic rate lower and lower, and end up gaining more and more fat!
Not only this, but we receive inadequate nutrients in imbalanced combinations. The entire body is taxed. Studies show that yo-yo dieting leads to an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. So if crash dieting doesn’t work, then what exactly does? You already know the answer! Exercise, in combination with a sensible diet.
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