Restrictive calorie diets and your metabolism. So, let me explain what’s really going on!
When you reduce calories below the level your body requires to maintain lean body mass and meet metabolic demands, you do lose weight, but a portion of that weight is muscle tissue. The scale is telling you things are going wonderfully, but the scale neglects to point out that if you lose muscle you slow your metabolism.
Research has proven that your metabolism declines nearly 2% every decade, and follow up research indicates an indisputable connection between age-related metabolic slow down and a gradual loss of muscle tissue. Again repeating myself – muscle tissue is calorie active tissue ‘muscle burns calories‘. Fat is simply stored fuel. Remember the scale cannot tell you the difference. Muscle is also the physical location where fat is burned, so if you lose weight and ’any’ portion of that weight is muscle, you’ve crippled your body’s fat burning machine.
Also it’s valuable to note that when you are in a calorie deprived state your endocrine system attempts to protect you from starvation. Repeated bouts of this situation will coax the thyroid gland to make metabolic shifts so your body can survive and maintain on fewer calories. Together with muscle loss, this absolutely guarantees that fat loss will be a greater challenge in the future. Now on the flip side when you go back to your ’so called’ normal eating habits you will more than likely gain all the weight you’ve lost back with additional weight as well. Yes your metabolism has been affected with no way to stimulate it. Most will end up becoming yoyo dieters returning to the same system that had failed them before.
Don’t take me wrong, I would never personally attempt to attack any diet program considering I have written my own book with a process that make the best sense for a chance at freeing yourself from a weight-loss rollercoaster ride, as well as bringing you closer to optimal health. So with that in mind, I know Weight Watchers is so called ‘sensible’ and Jenny Craig is so called ‘balanced’ and they all play up the idea of a healthy lifestyle change. The point they miss is in recognizing that if you want to boost your metabolism you cannot starve away metabolically active tissue. What you want to do is protect or add on muscle to stimulate increases in your metabolism thus keeping your body more efficient at burning through food.
If all your attempts include a form of calorie deprivation, don’t blame yourself, because it all boils down to misinformation. Society is taught this with the many dieting programs we been pounded with, so it’s not your fault. You never really failed the diets you’ve tried, the diets failed you. If you recognize that with each perceived failure you return to the same technology that failed you, perhaps with a different twist or name, but the same ’cut calories’ approach, you will also recognize that you need not a repackaging of the same approach, but a new approach, one that absolutely works.
I use the word synergy quite a bit when talking to clients. I use it specifically to define and summarize the vital relationship between supportive eating ‘which is not starving’ but eating in a manner that boosts your metabolism, resistance training, moderate aerobic activity and a concern for muscle. All of these elements must be in place at the same time if you want to ensure a long lasting positive physical change.
Regardless of what you hear or want to believe aerobic training is absolutely a piece of the puzzle but without resistance training it can actually amplify muscle loss. Think about it this way, if you’re not taking in enough calories to sustain lean body mass, and at the same time you’re putting your body in a state where it wants to protect you by slowing down your metabolism and now compound this challenge with aerobic exercise you’re further coaxing your body to sacrifice muscle.
So here it is, the secret to successful and permanent weight loss done healthy and right….Resistance exercise, moderate aerobic activity, and ample calories in frequent meals. This will allow you to add muscle, increase the rate of oxidation of food, maintain consistent energy stores, and burn fat as fuel. If you haven’t tried this approach, I mean all three components simultaneously; the good news here is you haven’t tried the very thing that will give you permanent healthy weight loss. This is truly the outline of a Healthy Lifestyle.
