You may have heard this 100 times or you may never have heard it at all, that doesn’t really bother me. What is bothering is the fact that you have to be here reading this article, because in an ideal scenario you would have previously been successful in losing all of the weight that you want. There are probably many reasons for your current lack of success, many of which are really quite obvious - but ones that you have failed to address. That’s the cold hard truth!
One of the major myths around losing fat is that if you eat nothing and exercise you will lose fat. Well that may happen, but it will happen incredibly slowly, by which time you will have suffered an extremely painful starvation death. However, there are many healthier and easier ways to lose fat – and subscribing to an extremely low calorie diet is not one of those ways.
The system in your body that is designed to deal with the fat loss and holding on to fat is the metabolic system. Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that happen in the cells of living organisms to sustain life. If you eat nothing and just exercise, your body goes in to what is commonly known as starvation mode. It thinks that it is not getting enough energy so it holds onto that stubborn body fat for a rainy day. To convince your metabolism thoroughly enough that you don’t need it you need to eat fat! And you need to eat in general a healthy diet.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “healthy diet” a thousand times but why would anyone give up on a winning policy and that I’m afraid, is one! You see the trick is to eat the right kinds of foods. There has been millions of dollars spent on research in to what kind of foods allow you to lose the most weight the fastest. The result is as simple as eating a lot of vegetables along with healthy fats and proteins. In addition, there are some really easy basic rules like cut out the amount of saturated fat you have, but eat lots of unsaturated fat, this fat will tend not to stay in your body, and will also assist with the removal of the stubborn body fat that you already have. This really isn’t as difficult as it sounds; just eat the right kinds of foods and make sure you get in some well needed exercise, including walking. Movement is key.
Furthermore to your metabolism, you need to stay hydrated; water retention and lack of water are equally troublesome when it comes to achieving fat loss goals. Well eating very little and especially drinking very little can cause a lot of water retention as you’re not hydrating your body thoroughly enough. This can give you that bloated puffy feeling and drastically add to your weight. The moral of the story, if you want to lose weight (specifically, body fat), continue eating more and drink a lot of water! It’s so simple but so many people choose to utterly ignore it and go about their day-to-day starvation diets as if it’s something to be proud of.
Achieve the body that you really want, and deserve, by going about it in an easily managed, healthy way.
Just to finish I would like to talk about the difference between not eating and fasting. You can effectively fast for fast loss to achieve a calorific deficit more easily and therefore lose more fat. This needs to be done in a controlled fashion and combined with a structured exercise regime. But just not eating is bad for your health and can lead to serious illness.
