Dieting can make you fat because diet books and weight loss establishments often assume that the body's metabolic rate is static. It isn't. Most of these diets imply that most, if not all, weight lost is fat. It isn't. The initial big loss during a diet is of water and glycogen, a form of glucose stored with water in the liver and muscles.
Metabolic rate slows dramatically during a diet because much of the weight loss is tissue which, unlike fat, is designed to be metabolically active. Hence the slowing down of weight loss as the diet continues. The body will shed active tissue that consumes a lot of energy (lean mass) and will protect the relatively inactive tissue (fat) which is vital to store in times of starvation or famine. The body of an active person will adapt to protect muscle that is constantly used. The body of a sedentary person will shed muscle because it isn't used very much.
Constant dieting trains the body to endure diets. It does this by a process of shedding some lean tissue and replacing it with fat. Therefore, the metabolic rate of the dieter drops from one diet to the next. Dieting slows down the body and creates the conditions for gaining fat. Gradually, dieters get fatter and fatter on less and less food. Since fat weighs less than lean tissue, you can lose weight by dieting and still gain a greater volume, as well as proportion, of fat to lean tissue.
Copyright 2011 Lynn Borenius Brown
For more information about video classes and individual sessions, please visit: http://EmpoweredDieter.org
No comments:
Post a Comment