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After the blog the other week about “Eating more to lose weight” I had a few replies.
Some pointing our that they’d found a higher calorie diet easier to stick to and, therefore, done better.
Which I fully agree with.
500 cals a day would, in theory, get pretty rapid weight loss.
No getting away from that.
But if someone stopped it after four days because they felt awful?
They would get better results from doing, say, 1,200 cals for a whole month.
Doesn’t mean the extra 700 cals magically “kickstarted their metabolism” though.
Starvation and weight loss
We also have people ask about ‘starvation mode’.
And whether it was true that the body can ‘hold onto’ fat when we starve ourselves.
The answer is ‘kinda’.
Much of the effect of starving ourselves not being as effective as we might expect………
Is the big drop in activity that it can cause.
If we dropped from a maintenance level of, say, 2000 calories to 500 calories there’s a pretty good chance we’d be so low in energy we’d do less that day.
Our physical activity might drop by 750 calls worth that day.
Meaning the actual deficit is halved to 750.
Example numbers, of course.
You can increase or decrease dependant on size.
But the point is valid.
There is also an element of the body adjusting internal energy use and of catabolising muscle tissue in order to maintain an amount of fat.
But that doesn’t really apply to most of us.
Because we’re not actually ‘starving’.
We’re just ‘quite hungry’.
To be starving we need to have pretty low body fat and be in a substantial deficit for a while. That’s when the question of starvation and weight loss comes up.
A few days or weeks of even fairly substantial portion cutting will, at most, initiate “quite hungry mode”.
Not nice, sure.
But not the same as starving.
Successful weight loss comes from finding a deficit that is somewhere between perfectly fine and tolerable.
That we can happily (or at least, slightly begrudgingly) stick to till we get where we’d like to be and then transition into a maintenance level.
Being overly hungry isn’t the answer.
Doesn’t mean we’re in starvation mode.
Just that it’s not maintainable.
Some tactical swaps of high energy density foods (often things high in sugar and / or fat) for lower density one (veg is great) can mean we even end up eating more volume of food.
But, however we create that deficit, keep it between tolerable and perfectly fine and we’ll get there with time 🙂
Much love,
Jon ‘Tolerable’ Hall and Matt ‘Intolerant’ Nicholson
P.S. Yesterday’s middle names were word endings that can come after the Circum from Circumstances.
P.P.S. Already down to 2 weeks on Tuesday till the next find out more meeting. And we’ve got something pretty cool that we’re going to be trialling in July. So if you, or a friend, have been thinking about this, now is the best time –> Click to find out about the Briefing Meeting at RISE in Macclesfield.
RISE Macclesfield – myrise.co.uk
Serious transformations. Fun times!
Enter your details at myrise.co.uk for more information about what we do.
Or check out our monthly find-out-more meeting if you want to learn more about our free ’20lbs weight loss in 8 weeks’ and ‘Beach Body’ challenges –> myrise.co.uk/briefing-meeting
