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Hmmm, haven't dropped in to the forum for a few days, but I see there is a thread with my name on it and some people were asking my opinion about "diets". Why, thank you! First off, it might appear that I've been "trashing" WL4I. Well, yes I was, because the thread was about WL4I. But I don't believe in the "diet" approach as such to lose weight, no matter if it's Atkins or LAWL or whatever. "Dieting" is a recipe for disaster that will always end in the dieter getting fatter than before they began. Let me explain my rationale for saying this.
The first the point I want to make is that if you want to lose weight, and you want to keep it off, you simply must exercise!
Most “diets” offer the allure of quick weight loss. Take that weightloss4idiots diet I talked about previously that is advertised all over the net. Lose 12 lbs in 10 days! the ad promises. Magazines such as Woman’s World regularly feature the “diet of the week”. You can see feature articles on the cover that advertise you can lose 20 lbs in 10 days. Right! Unless they’re talking amputation or liposuction, that’s absurd. But it does sell magazines, and that’s what counts. What’s even more amazing is that people actually believe this drivel!
These promises are a recipe for disaster, and if you’re not clear why, let’s look at what really happens when you fall for one of these quick weight loss gimmicks and go on one of these plans. First, realize that muscle is metabolically active tissue. A pound of muscle tissue burns around 50 calories a day. Fat is inert. It just sits there as fuel storage. It burns little, if any calories.
When you diet by cutting calories, you lose mainly two things – water and muscle tissue. On that WL4I diet, that 12 lbs you lose might be comprised of 5 lbs of muscle. What happens when you lose muscle is that your metabolism slows. Once you come off the diet, you’re ravenous and start eating. Only now, having lost five pounds of muscle, you can only assimilate 250 less calories than you could before the diet. If you just ate as much as you did before the diet, you would store an extra 250 calories a day as fat. That works out to about a pound gain in fat every 2 weeks.
Now every time you “diet”, the cycle is repeated. You continue to lose more and more muscle tissue each time you “diet”, and you keep getting fatter and fatter. All is not lost, though. The good news is that muscle tissue and your metabolism can be restored through proper eating and exercise.
Now a fair question you might ask would be, why does the body burn muscle and not fat when you diet? So lets answer that. We’ve all heard of carbohydrates. They are a plant based food source that gets their energy from sunlight. Once carbohydrates are digested and broken down into simple sugars, the liver converts them to glucose that is then carried to the body cells to supply energy to the cells. The liver also converts glucose to glycogen to fuel the muscles.
Now when we “diet”, one of the first things we cut back on are the carbohydrates. Once the supply of glucose is depleted, the body has to find more. Glucose can’t be created from fat. But through a process called gluconeogenesis, muscle tissue can be broken down to create glucose. That’s why we lose muscle on calorie-restricted diets.
It should be noted too that a molecule of glucose holds a great deal of water. As we use up our supply of glucose, water is released. That accounts for the initial drop in weight we see when we “diet”. It’s simply a matter of water being released from the tissues because glucose is being depleted.
As we’ve seen, we can’t afford to lose any of the lean muscle tissue we have. We need all we have to burn fat. And that is what modern weight loss is all about – losing fat, not pounds. You could lose 5 lbs of fat, but build 5 lbs of lean and the scale would show no improvement. But you would be a much smaller person because muscle is so much more compact than blubber. This is why you can be a smaller, healthier person without losing too much weight – if you go about it the proper way!
Judging your progress by the scale alone is not the best idea. Instead, what you need to do is have a body compositon analysis done before you begin your weight loss program to see how much lean mass you have, and how much fat you have. Then, instead of solely trying to lose pounds, concentrate on lowering your body fat to a healthy range.
So how then do you lose weight correctly? You need to utilize three techniques in your strategy. First, eat a nutritious diet, but one that has slightly fewer calories than your daily requirements so as to create a slight calorie deficit. Second, start a program of cardio work to burn the fat, and third, also include resistance exercise into your workout routine to help maintain the muscle mass you have. This is a case of “synergy” where the combined effect of diet, cardio, and resistance, is greater than the sum of their individual effects alone. The weight will come off!
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