Ok I was having a conversation with Mrs.Phlosphr this morning and we were debating that:
If you are used to eating a certain amount, and you suddenly stop eating and basically just drink water and eat meagerly, you will actually be doing more harm than good. Your body will ‘retain’ all that you eat, you won’t pass much and you’ll actually gain weight instead of lose it. Furthermore to actually lose weight one must exercise and eat non-fatty foods.
Q: Doctors or nutritionists or ‘good’ dieters out there…is this infact true: Can you do more harm than good when it comes to dieting if you just simply stop eating and only eat meagerly? If so Why?
**We are not obese people, but we have a close friend who is very obese and he seems to never eat, he drinks alot but thats about it…Could he be starving himself to Obesity?
If you are burning more calories than you are eating, you will lose weight. End of story.
On a starvation diet, you will lose weight. The problem, really strict diets tend to depress your metabolism. Excercise can help keep it higher. If you metabolism gets seriously depressed, it can lead to weight gain when you resume your normal diet.
If Mrs. Phlosphr’s assertations were strictly true, you would see alot of overweight POW’s. That just doesn’t happen. They get skinny just as you would expect from their inadaquate diet. Keep in mind that many of these POWs get about zero excercise locked in a tiny cell all the time.
Also, I recall reading (I’ll look for a cite) that when in starvation-mode, the body also uses up muscle [sub]to an extent[/sub] as well as fat reserves. Hence… bad idea.
I don’t know if it’s true but I have heard that following a strict diet people are liable to gain more weight back for two reasons.
As scotth pointed out your metabolism gets depressed from dieting. When you start eating again your body doesn’t burn as much off.
Your body has just had a sense that it was starving. It will want to pack more fat away against a future day when it may starve again. In short, your body will conspire to add more weight than you previously had tp prevent what it views as future starvation.
To clarify what Xerxes said–once you’ve depleted your body’s sources of glucose (primarily the glucagon in your liver and muscles), you body begins gluconeogenesis in order to synthesize glucose. That’s because certain tissues, primarilly the brain, can only use glucose as their fuel. Your body can take amino acids, strip off the nitrogens, and use those carbon skeletons to make glucose. However, all of this takes energy to do, which your body supplies by the beta-oxidation of fatty acids.
So, in short, when you have no glucose, your body takes amino acids (which are in proteins) and uses them to make glucose. Fatty acids are broken down, and that energy is used to run the amino acid–>glucose conversion.
If I got some details wrong, don’t kill me–it’s been a while since biochem.
I’ve always wondered if the “you’ll ruin your metabolism forever of you starve” claim was true. While I’m sure that your metabolism slows down at the time you are not eating, how long does it take to speed back up again when one starts eating normally? Is it irreparably damaged as I’ve heard some claim or does it pretty much bounce back once normal eating and activity patterns are resumed?
Seems to me I once read that in starvation mode, the body increases it fat storage capacity, pretty much what Whack-a-Mole mentioned. I believe it was by creating more fat cells. The upshot was, there’s a greater tendency to add body fat once food is readily available.
Nothing is forever. If you starve yourself, your body will slow down its metabolism in order to survive. Once you start eating normally, the need for that disappears and your metabolism will return to normal.
To lose fat, one must exercise and cut down on caloric intake. If you diet without exercising, your body will burn both fat and protein (amino acids) for glucogenesis, and you will lose muscle along with fat.
The metabolism does bounce back to normal within a reasonable span of time. However, as said before, the body does burn muscle as well as fat during starvation, so when you come out, you may well have a slower metabolism, having less muscle and fat tissue to support. But you’re eating for your former self, so you’re possibly eating more than you need. Thus, weight gain, unless that’s negated by exercise.
I think the reason the myth persists about dieting making it easier to gain weight in the future is because many people on starvation diets end them by binge eating, and in so doing they pick up a bunch of bad habits about the foods they eat, which are hard to shake off.
I think the reason the myth persists about dieting making it easier to gain weight in the future is because many people on starvation diets end them by binge eating, and in so doing they pick up a bunch of bad habits about the foods they eat, which are hard to shake off.