Think About the Numbers for Losing Fat
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010It is a given that 3500 calories equals one pound of fat. That being said, in order to take off 5 pounds in one week you need to drop 17,500 calories in that week.
Seriously, if your average diet is 2000 calories per day, which is enough to keep you healthy, you only take in 14,000 calories for the entire week. You can take off one pound, but that won’t work to lose five pounds in one week, because you don’t have anything to keep you alive. Losing five pounds means burning everything you eat in a week, plus 500 calories that you don’t have every day. Or don’t eat for nine days. Obviously, if your goal is five pound per week, you can’t do it by diet alone.
So if you eliminate food, you’re in for a rough ride. Your body has this involuntary reaction which we refer to as hibernation, in bears. As good a name as any in people, but we usually call it metabolism. When the food stops coming in, your metabolism picks up on it and starts burning protein, which is your lean muscle. It’s 75% water, and is your first line of weight loss. You lose your water. You ever see body builders with their protein drinks and protein bars and protein powder? Lots of muscle there, isn’t there? But the next thing that your metabolism does is worse. It starts to burn carbohydrates, which means that your fat increases. You start to put more weight on!
If you can’t diet off the weight then it stands to reason that you have to work on increasing your metabolism. Normally a diet gets you to take in fewer calories and what you burn slowly reduces your size. Actually, you are just losing water. As your metabolism adjusts, you stop losing and pretty soon you start to gain again. You are in hibernation. Any food you take in is converted immediately to fat to help you through this period of starvation. Store fat and slow down. A bear can sleep though an entire winter without eating.
One thing is for sure: Body Builders don’t eat a lot of Big Macs and Whoppers. They have a totally different diet, and couple with some simple exercises, they control their metabolisms. If you like that sort of look, they are usually pretty hot, too. They eat like they will never have another meal. For all the food they take in, they should weight 400 pounds, but they don’t. They have learned to speed up their metabolism, so what they eat is going into muscle building, not fat storing.
By now you must understand that you can’t just diet and make fat go away, so you have to make a choice, a complete lifestyle choice. You want to lose weight? Start with a little exercise to get your metabolism kicked up. THEN start your diet. After that you increase your exercise. By starting after you have increased your metabolism, the whole thing will be more effective, and the pounds will come off faster and more easily. The lifestyle change is more likely to be permanent.
Understand that you put your weight on because you don’t burn everything that you eat. You store some of it, and over time, that weight builds up. Problem is, storage is driven by what you eat and that consumption is mostly about water. Protein is 75% water. When you go on a diet, after you clear out the water you burn protein from your storehouse.
You can’t just diet fat off because your body will give away all of it’s protein to protect itself, so you start to live on carbohydrates- and gain weight. When you lower your food intake, you lose protein, and this loss lowers your burn rate.
Ifyour diet seems to be taking forever, consider that 3500 calories is one pound of fat. Go ahead, visit my website at the link, or see my blog. There’s lots of articles and the blog has some great stuff as well.
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