Why starving yourself is not a good way to lose weight
It’s been ages since you stepped on a scale. You wake up one morning and decide summer is getting close or that you have a big wedding coming up that you just have to look amazing for. If you’re a guy you may want to be able to show off toned muscles like a Hollywood star. You step on a scale and realize you have added 15 pounds since the last time you weighed yourself. It may not seem like a lot to some people but it is shocking to you. The pounds added up in 2 months! How can this be? Maybe there is something wrong with your scale. You start thinking about it and realize you have a good excuse. Life has been hectic. You may have started stress eating without paying attention. You may have had a crazy college semester or a turbulent couple of months at work. You just have not had the luxury of time. Time to pay attention. Time to care about yourself or time to even think about working out. It’s not your fault, it’s just life.
After you settle on who is to blame, you decide there is only one solution. You have to fix this in time for your wedding, summer, or you just plainly have to fix this so you can become the person you have always wanted to be. Your next big question is: “How do you fix it?” You decide to grab life by the horns and lose this weight in record time. Because the only culprit you know is “food,” you decide to eliminate it or drastically reduce it from your diet.
Different forms of starvation
Partial starvation: Eating much less than you usually would. You decide to start your weight loss journey by skipping breakfast. Sometime around 11 a.m on day 1 you feel really tired and need a drink. Heading to the vending machine, diet soda seems like a good choice since you are on a diet. You struggle through the day and somehow manage to make it through except that your concentration starts dwindling at about 2 p.m. “Maybe a little snack will fix this,” you tell yourself. Too tired to walk all the way to a coffee shop, you decide to get a Cinnabon roll from the vending machine. You tell yourself that you will make up for this Cinnabon later by eating a salad. At the end of the day, you go to a drive through and get a salad with little or no nutritional value. It has iceberg lettuce, and a few scattered shreds of carrots, 2 grape tomatoes, croutons, and fried chicken strips. You are still hungry at the end of the day but decide you will sleep it off. This “diet” continues for 2 weeks and you give up, returning to your old eating pattern.
Complete starvation:
In this form of starvation, you abstain from food totally. You may decide to drink water to try to get through the day or some form of tea. However, you do not take anything of nutritional value. This is not sustainable either so you would likely return to eating faster than you would with partial starvation.
The set point theory makes these 2 scenarios above a bad idea. This is one of the things I learned during my undergraduate degree in Kinesiology that really stuck with me. When you eat a certain amount of food and go about your regular level of activity, your brain and body become accustomed to a basic metabolic point. That means your body is using up food at a particular rate to create the energy you need to go about your regular level of activity. Denying yourself of food will upset this metabolic point and cause your body to go into panic mode, slowing down your metabolism and storing as much as it can instead of burning it up as energy. After the failed diet, you are more likely to end up gaining weight than losing it due to a slower metabolism. So, in the end, starving yourself caused you to gain and not lose weight.
Reference:
Center for Clinical interventions: Set point theory. Retrieved from: http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/docs/set%20point%20theory.pdf
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