Your Shortcut to Better Health

If you eat less calories than you expend for a long time (let’s say a month), will you lose weight? Of course – there is no way around it. Your body has to get the ‘fuel’ for your cells from somewhere else. However, things are not that simple. Here are a few reasons why:

• It is slow – trying to burn fat by restricting calories is the slowest way to lose weight. There are about 9000 kcal in 2,2 lbs of body fat. 2000 kcal per day is a standard caloric expenditure for a person.This means that if you ate nothing for 4,5 days you would lose about 2 pounds. Once you start eating again, you are very unlikely to start eating 2000 kcal per day again. It will usually be a bit more and things will go back to normal.
• It’s very hard – dealing with the hunger pangs and low blood sugar causes most people to give up.
• If you are a women, at certain periods your body values your body fat more than your muscles or other tissue. It has to do with leptin and child bearing. This means that you will not burn only fat, but muscle as well, which will not give you a pretty result, to say the least.
• Your body’s desire for food is designed to help you survive, not to look fit.
• There are much easier ways! Restricting calories is like trying to get your can up the hill by pushing it instead of driving it – there is no point.

There are many more reasons – most people try to lose weight by restricting about 300-400 calories per day. After a few days, they experience very strong hunger pangs and headaches and sooner or later indulge in binges, which undo their progress. Your body does not look at your daily food intake, but works on a much longer time-frame and knows exactly how to keep you fed. It’s how we survived back in the day when there were no supermarkets and food was not as easily and constantly available.
A much easier and better way to lose weight fast is to:
For men – do intermittent fasting. It’s magic and is a very good way to get lean fast. For women – focus on enabling your body to burn the fat by manipulating leptin. If you have read about this you know that it is very easy and efficient way to start losing fat very fast.
In conclusion, restricting calories is yet another willpower-based strategy, which sooner or later can fail very easily. Exerting willpower to not eat is a very painful and slow way to ‘force’ your body to resort to your fat stores and start burning them.