Think About the Numbers for Losing Fat

It 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!

You have to control the burn rate, not the caloric intake. I mentioned body builders a minute ago. 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.

When you cut out food, your body will throw all of it's protein under the bus trying to protect itself. Without food, your body makes a bunch of decisions. (This is your body, not you. It's a physiology thing.) After it takes all of the protein out of your muscle, (I'll come back to body builders in a minute) your body will start to live on carbohydrates and when that happens you will gain weight! Your body will go into hibernation mode. You have to change the way your body works to make fat go away. It's called METABOLISM. Your metabolism slows down and you won't lose any weight, you'll gain more.

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.

This isn't about trying to sell you a product; it's about what will be good for you. Wrap your head around the fact 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 becomes your weight problem. Storage is driven by consumption, and 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.

When your diet come toms to be taking too long, remember that 3500 calories is one pound of fat. Go ahead, come to my website at the link, or come to my blog. There's lots of articles and the blog has some great stuff as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 7:39 am and is filed under Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.