Fat Loss! Think With Me for a Second

by Guest Author on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 | No Comments

Are you aware that 3500 calories is one pound of fat? If you want to lose one pound in a week, you have to cut out 3500 calories, so to lose five pound in a week, you have to cut out 17,500 calories.

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.

One thing is for sure: Body Builders are mostly protein, and very little fat. They don’t eat a lot of Big Macs and Whoppers. They have a totally different diet with protein drinks and bars and shakes. They couple that with some simple exercises, and they control their metabolisms. If you like that sort of look, they are usually pretty hot, yet they eat like there won’t be food tomorrow. You have to control the burn rate, not the caloric intake.

The real deal is, 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. Get your metabolism kicked up. Once it starts to take off a little weight, THEN start your diet. After that you increase your exercise. If you wait to start until you have increased your metabolism, all your work will be more effective. The pounds will come off faster and more easily. The weight loss 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. Here’s your chance, visit my website at the link, or come to my blog. There’s lots of articles and the blog has some interesting opinions as well.