Just about everyone who has ever embarked upon the unwelcome task of trying to lose weight wants just one thing: to lose weight as fast as humanly possible.
Unfortunately, very few diet programs address the vital topic of how to speed up metabolism, instead focusing on reducing the amount of food that can be consumed daily in order to force your body to convert stored fat into useable energy to meet your day to day needs. This faulty learning leads to the damaging belief that if reducing your food intake results in weight loss, then near-starvation must inevitably lead to an even faster reduction in body weight.
But is the theory of starvation myth or magic? Can periods of virtual famine actually speed your weight loss in the long run? Or are you simply denying your body the food it needs for no good reason other than you read it in a magazine somewhere?
Well, let’s look at this theory in a little more detail.
Every person on this planet has a minimum, daily energy requirement just to survive – and that’s without doing anything more energetic than remaining still, flat on their back, breathing. This level is called your ‘resting metabolic rate’ and is roughly calculated as being ten times your body weight in pounds. So, for a person who weighs 160 pounds, their resting metabolic rate would be around 1,600 calories. This is the figure that is genuinely improtant when considering weight loss metabolism.
Once you stand upright & start moving around, of course, your energy requirements start to shoot upwards.
Now, in spite of our sophisticated, modern lives, our bodies are still functioning as they did in the Stone Age and our basic, physical nature is to survive at all costs. In order to save our poor brains the effort of dealing with all the complex tasks related to simply ‘being’, our subconscious brain takes care of all this in the background, allowing our higher brain to deal with more interesting matters.
And here is the crux of the matter – if we deliberately starve ourselves of food to a point where we are not eating sufficient to meet out resting metabolic rate needs, we force our Stone Age survival instincts to kick in and the very first response is to cause our metabolism – the rate at which our body burns energy – to slow down and conserve what little energy it has.
So starvation, instead of showing us how to increase metabolism, actually damages our weight loss efforts by causing the opposite to happen.
Yes, our bodies will lose weight if we severely restrict our food intake but up to half that weight loss will also come from converting healthy muscle tissue into useable energy. Our survival instinct just wants to keep us alive – it really doesn’t care where the energy comes from when in crisis mode.
And as muscle cells burn up to 70% more energy than fat cells, you can see that by starving yourself in order to lose weight not only shoots yourself in the foot by slowing your metabolism but shoots yourself in the other foot too by causing muscle loss.
So what is the answer then?
Simple – work out your approximate resting metabolic rate and always make sure that you eat a sufficient number of calories each day to reach that level. By doing this, you will avoid tipping over into starvation mode and its accompanying slowing of metabolism.
If you eat healthily, never reduce your calorie intake below your resting metabolic rate and make sure that your are eating enough food (but not too much!), you should be able to manage your weight with ease.
Now we know that starvation is very definitely a dieting myth rather than a useful piece of weight loss magic, the real secret lies in eating enough and therefore understanding how to speed up metabolism, rather than cause it to slow down.