|
11 April 2010
The Dark Side of Low-Calorie Diets:
What Most Nutritionists Won't Tell You
Cliff Baker
Despite your spending time on the treadmill . . . at the gym with the weights . . . walking the neighborhood? The answer is as close as your dinner plate. Discover the sabotaging effects of low-calorie intake on a diet. And learn the secrets most nutritionists
refuse to tell you!
Serious about weight loss? The accepted truth about the subject has always been to cut your calories. Eat less than what you're expending. You'll lose weight. Guaranteed!
Bull feathers! It's only recently that many in the conventional medical community, as well as many fitness experts have begun to challenge this paradigm. And with good reason. Low-calorie diets -- especially extreme low-calorie attempts -- can do your body more harm than good in the long term.
Fitness expert Tom Venuto, author of
Burn The Fat; Feed the Muscle is one of those not afraid to warn you of the
dark side of low-calorie diets. It just might be the real reason you're struggling with your weight, despite all your good intentions and hard work, he says.
Withhold food from your body and it simply goes into what's called "starvation response." Your body doesn't know you're dieting to lose weight on purpose. It believes food is being withheld because it's just not available. Because of this, your system will pull out every trick it knows to keep you alive for as long as possible. Ironic, isn't it?
How does it do this? One of the most noticeable ways is by slowing its metabolic rate. You're probably already familiar with this. This consequence of low-calorie dieting is already pretty well documented.
But there's another, less known reason why your body reacts adversely to a low-calorie diet. Your body works to stay alive on fewer calories through loss of muscle tissue. Muscle is what medical experts call "metabolically active tissue." Ditching muscle is one of your body's ways of lowering its overall energy expenditure. All in all, it's relatively easy for your body to use muscle to create energy.
It's a process called gluconeogenesis. This is a long, scientifically based word that basically identifies the process by which your body converts its muscle into (now get this!)
glucose!
And don't think any muscle is immune from this process. Oh no! Gluconeogenesis affects all of your muscles -- skeletal, internal organs, and yes, even your heart muscle. (Getting to see some less than healthy implications here?)
Numerous studies back these statements up. They've shown, without fail, that very low-calorie diets (without the accompanying exercise) eventually cause up to 50 percent of the weight loss to come directly from your lean tissue.
Now, let's take this one more step. From the loss of what, glycogen and muscle, 75 percent of that weight you are losing
is not fat! That means you're starving yourself, losing muscle, possibly harming your organs, including your heart and still not reducing the amount of fat on your body! Now, what's wrong with this picture?
The next time you're tempted to skip that meal or go on even fewer calories out of frustration, think about that. You're not really doing your body any favors. In fact, the less you eat the more harm you're doing to your body in the long term.
The key? Eat more of the healthy, nutrient dense foods that give you energy and supply you with an abundance of vitamins and minerals. Yep, you know what I'm talking about: fruits and vegetables. And don't forget to throw in a smattering of protein too.
Now that you know the "dark side" of low-calorie diets, you'll hopefully steer clear of them.
|
