Diet versus dieting and the balloon effect
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your diet versus dieting. People frequently refer to their overall eating habits as their "diet," not to be confused with dieting. Dieting is changing ones eating habits in an effort to lose weight. The idea behind dieting is weight loss. The problem is the hard core dieting (AKA crash diets) in the long run don't work. Why you ask? Many short-term diets require a dramatic drop in calories in an effort to lose weight. Sounds simple enough, eat less, lose weight, right? Maybe. Many of these "diets" require you to eat so little that you don't consume enough calories to maintain your body's muscle mass. Why is muscle important you ask? Each pound of muscle on your body burns 50 calories at rest each day. Lose just one pound of muscle from a hard core diet, and your body loses the ability to burn 18,250 calories a year. Since each pound of fat on our bodies is the equivalent of 3500 calories, that one pound of muscle loss reduces your body's ability to burn roughly 5lbs of fat over the course of a year. Say you lose just one pound of muscle due to your "dieting," when you go back to your normal eating habits, your body won't be able to burn off as many of those calories as before. Not only will you eventually gain back all the weight you lost, but you'll quite possibly tack on a few more now that your body's fat burning machine is a little less effective. This is known as a ballooning effect.
How do you avoid all this and effectively lose weight and keep it off you ask? The key is not to go diet crazy, and to make what I like to call a lifestyle change. That means eat a little less, and make what you eat healthier. To lose weight you need to create a calorie deficit, which means taking in fewer calories than your body can burn on its own. The best way would be to combine healthy eating with exercise. If exercise isn't possible, then your only other option is to start dropping the calories from a reduction your daily food consumption. Start logging how many calories you eat in a given day. If you can cut out say 500 calories a day, you'll lose a pound a week. Doesn't sound like much, but that's 52lbs a year, and doing it in a healthy way. But why not push yourself; combine eating less with exercise for a synergistic fat burning experience. Push yourself to go the gym 3 times a week, lift some light weights, and get a little cardiovascular exercise. If you can burn 600 calories 3 times a week at the gym (combined with a 500 calorie reduction in food consumption each day), you'll now be losing 1.5lbs a week, or about 75lbs a year JUST from the your reduction in calories consumption and burning of calories via exercise. What you need to keep in mind is that the 75lbs we just calculated does not factor in the extra calorie burning you will achieve from the added muscle you will gain through exercise. If you can add just 5lbs of lean muscle to your body over a 1 year period, you'll easy shed another 10-15lbs of fat on top of the 75lbs by the end of the year. Sounds like a no brainer to me! For all of you who say you don't have time to watch what you eat or go to the gym, making a little extra time now will add a lot of extra time to your life. A little now for a lot later. If that's not the bargain of the century I don't know what is.
