Eat to Lose Weight - Why Starvation Diets Never Work

Asking your body to work without food is like asking your car to keep running once its gauge says "empty". It is just not going to happen. Your car needs fuel in the form of gasoline to work properly; your body needs fuel in the form of calories to run properly as well. Giving your body good fuel will allow it to work properly and will allow you to achieve not only better health, but the slow and steady weight loss that is actually sustainable and realistic. Starvation diets do not work for weight loss because starvation throws everything in the body out of balance, everything including your metabolism

Your metabolism is the rate at which your body uses the fuel that it gets for energy. In simpler terms, metabolism is how fast your body burns calories. Nearly everything that you eat or drink has calories. Calories are the unit used to measure the amount of energy that it takes to convert and use food for energy. If you eat more calories than your body needs to maintain its systems and to move around, you will store what is left in your fat cells; you will gain weight.

If you burn off too many calories and do not replace them, your body will seek energy from other sources which could include your own lean muscle tissues. While you do want to burn your fat for energy, you do not want to destroy muscle in the process. Weight loss then becomes a delicate balancing act of learning what is and what is not the right amount of calories to take in each day.

Starvation is not a normal state for your body to be in. To survive, the body will sense that it is in danger and will start shutting down the metabolism - it will not burn any fuel for energy. What will happen instead is simple: the body will hold on to every single calorie it receives, and when you do eat, your body will continue holding on. If you slow or stall your metabolism for long enough, you may find it very difficult to get it started again.

While your body is busy storing all of the new calories it is taking in, the cells will still need energy, but will be getting it from other sources. Again, the muscle tissue will be in danger of being burned off to use as fuel. Consider it this way: You buy a home and fill one room with beautiful furniture and another room with firewood. When winter comes you are cold, but you do not want to have to buy more firewood so you burn your furniture instead. It does not make sense, does it? Starving yourself is the same thing. You have your beautiful and strong muscles that enable you to move and be active, but you are trying to lose weight as well. So, instead of feeding your muscles and moving around more, you starve yourself, and just like in the house with the fuel and the furniture, you burn off what you need to keep, and keep what you need to burn off.

Now we all know that's not right, so....

No more starvation!!