Unless you're bound and determined to gain weight quickly (having 3 or 4 Blizzards a day in addition to breakfast, lunch and dinner), you probably have never gained more than a pound a day. If you've skipped walking or biking for a week, and not only not left off a portion of food from your dinner, but added an extra portion, you'll gradually put on weight. A half pound one day...a half pound the next, and so on. It's so gradual you don't even notice it until one day, a month later, you find out not only that your slacks are getting a bit tight, but now you can't even zipper them up.
Time to reverse the process - and do it gradually.
People who go on crash diets to lose weight actually mess with their metabolism, and by the time they are finished, they will be unable to eat the same amount of food that they used to eat, without gaining weight. That's because their metabolism has slowed down, to compensate for what the body believed was a starvation process.
When the body doesn't get enough to eat, that's what it does. It goes after muscle first, before fat - it tries to conserve the fat to keep you alive.
That is one of the reasons why so many people who successfully lose a hundred pounds or so...gain it all back within a year. They go back to their old eating routine...and even if they maintain the exercise routine they started while they were losing weight, they still gain back all the weight. Why - their metabolism has slown down. It's busy (I'm anthropomorphising here) trying to get back all that weight it lost, so it will start storing fat quicker than ever before.
That is why it is important to lose weight gradually, so you don't play havoc with your metabolism. Be satisfied with losing 1 pound a week. A goal like that is eminently doable, does not require you to starve yourself or feel hungry, and once you reach your desire weight, will be easy to maintain, as I explain in future entries in this blog.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment