Lose Weight By Eating Fewer Calories |
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Myth number 7: The best way to lose
weight fast is to eat far fewer calories. I'm dead against very low-calorie diets and calorie-counting. It not only encourages obsessive eating – but the maths are patently wrong. Consider this simple example. A banana is approximately 100 calories, so, if you eat a banana fewer every day for a year, you'd lose 36,500 calories. A pound of body fat is equivalent to around 4,000 calories. That means you'd lose nearly 10lb in the first year, 501b by the fifth year, and 1001b after 10 years – and vanish completely after 15 years! The calorie equation for exercise is equally ridiculous. Cycle vigorously for 15 minutes each day and you will lose 10lb in the first year. Quite possibly. But 1001b after 10 years? No chance. However, according to calorie theory, merely a banana every day undoes all that hard work anyway. According to Dr Michael Colgan, nutritionist to many Olympic athletes, some athletes burn off more than 7,000 calories a day, but eat only 3,500 calories. Going by calorie theory alone, these athletes should have completely disappeared by now. An investigation by Dr Marian Appelbaum of the Bichat Hospital in Paris, of people living in famine in the Warsaw ghetto during World War One, came up with the same contradiction. With an average calorie intake of 800 calories a day, and a requirement of around 2,500 calories, a deficiency of 1,241,000 calories would have built up over two years. The average body has 301b of fat, representing 120,000 calories, to dispose of. Even if all the fat were lost, what happened to the other million calories? If you still believe it's all down to calories, listen to this. The Sunday Times Magazine put two similarly overweight people on diets, one on my original Fatburner Diet (approximately 1,500 calories a day), and one on the Cambridge Diet (then 330 calories). The Fatburner volunteer lost more weight after six weeks. The missing link in the low-calorie approach is metabolism the process of turning the fuel in food into energy that the body can use, and burning off unwanted fat. As we've seen, people's metabolism can vary considerably. Having a slow metabolism means you'll turn more food into fat. Most obese people have slower rates of metabolism than slim people. If you start out this way, a low-calorie diet can simply exacerbate the problem. With crash diets below 1,000 calories a day, the body sees this reduction in food as a threat, and slows down the metabolic rate by as much as 45 per cent. According to Dr John Marks from Cambridge University. 'As weight falls, the metabolic rate always falls too.' In the short term you can lose around 71b of body fluid and, if you're lucky, an absolute maximum of 21b of body fat a week, which together could account for as much as 10lb in two or three weeks. But the minute you go back to what you were eating before, the fluid returns. And so will the fat, because your metabolic rate has slowed down, meaning that you now need to eat less food to maintain a stable weight. This 'rebound effect' is good business for mortuaries. A report by the National Institutes of Health, using the findings of a 22-centre study called the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, showed that among people whose weight showed a wide variability over six to seven years there was a higher death rate. It's also good for food-replacement programs, whose customers try crash-dieting on average three times a year. The bottom line is that the body is intelligent. If you try to starve it, it will turn down your metabolic fire. If you work with its natural design you'll burn unwanted fat easily. However, very low-calorie diets do more than make you feel bad and gain weight afterwards. They can be dangerous, and are now required to provide at least 400 calories and 40g of protein per day for women and 500 calories and 50g of protein per day for men to ensure the dieter's body will not be breaking down muscle tissue or vital organs to meet calorie requirements. They do not encourage the re-education of eating habits. And they leave you very hungry. The solution in the eyes of the people designing these diets is wheat bran, which fills you up while at the same time supposedly triggering weight loss. But does that make dieters want to stick to the regime? To find out, if put ten people on a 1,000 calorie-a-day diet plus high fiber for three months. Only four lasted the course, with an average weight loss of a measly 3.251b. The high dropout rate is a reflection of how difficult it is to stick to a low-calorie diet for a long period of time. In another study we put ten slimmers on high-fiber tablets claimed to induce weight loss for a period of three months. Five completed the three months with an average weight loss of 1.51b. Not very impressive. However, some special kinds of fiber do assist weight loss and having a high-fiber diet by eating wholefoods – not by adding wheat bran – is definitely good for you. |
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