You are who you think you are

Sedentary, over sized people rationalize eating many thousands of calories every day. The thinking is "I'm a big guy, and thus I need more food to properly feed the inner man." This is not so. Most of this weight is fat, and unlike muscle is not metabolically active tissue. Fat does not contribute to burning off fat, but muscle does.

A lighter more fit person with more muscle and not too much stored fat requires more calories than an under-exercised, fatter, less muscular person. So we see that the opposite is true, the fit person needs more calories.

Should the sedentary person make a life changing decision to exercise, he will find that the exercising muscles burn calories, this eventually creates more muscle. The harder he works, the greater the energy expended during exercise, the greater the reduction of fat. Body fat is reduced by limiting calories, and performing aerobic exercise and weight training or body weight exercises. Calories will be burned, muscle will be maintained or built, and more muscle means less fat. Aerobic exercise is rhythmical, non-tensive exercise. Jogging, fast walking, swimming, bicycling are examples of this. Body weight exercises and weight training maintain or increase muscles. This type of exercise may be perfomed rapidly, providing some aerobic benefit. An example of this would be the P90X program.

A pound of fat has 3,500 kilocalories, so a daily reduction of food intake of 200 to 500 kilocalories will yield one to two pounds of weight loss per week. A kilocalorie is the large Calorie written with the large C.

Why didn't my diet work?

Perhaps 75 million people are on some type of diet in this country. Thanks to the mass media, and endless commercials, millions more are beginning a diet every day. Some are successful and lose weight, but many gain it back. Diets whose goal is rapid weight loss are not effective in promoting overall health, just the opposite is true, many types of diets are harmful. Crash diets aren't effective because the body quickly adjusts to a lower food intake by lowering its metabolic rate, which is the rate at which food is burned for energy. This mechanism is the result of the adaptations of man over thousands of years. The body resists the burning of fat. If the result of such a diet is a loss of 12 pounds, the body adjusts to having less food, when food intake is restored to normal levels, the body treats the food an an excess and stores it as fat.

The early success in a strict diet is usually due to water loss, and not fat. A restricted carbohydrate intake, reduces the water stores in the body. When fluid balance is restored, the scale does not show the loss that the dieter thought took place.

Further, on a strict diet, muscle tissue is lost as well as fat. The more dieting, the greater the amount of muscle tissue is lost compared to fat. The sad result is that the dieter is actually fatter, when viewed as a percentage of weight than before undertaking the diet, because the ratio of fat weight to lean body weight increases.

The goal of every dieter should be to reduce weight without losing muscle tissue. Those who put themselves on the dieting, gaining weight, and dieting again merry-go-round are weakening their body every time they diet. One may see this up and down in weight, occuring in the lives of friends and people in the public eye.
It is wrong-headed thinking and has a deleterious effect on the body and is wrong for the hoped for permanent loss of body fat.