Hey there. I have talked about this before on my blog as well as with many clients and others that I discuss weight loss with. This is probably the biggest mistake you can make if you are trying to lose weight. You try and lose weight by restricting your diet. I know you be asking well how do you lose weight without restricting calories? Obviously you most likely have to cut out some calories that are causing you to go into a caloric surplus (eat more than you burn). We have to drop the calories enough to get into a caloric deficit, but be careful.
The goal is not to eat nothing and drop weight fast. Yes this will work in the short term. You will drop weight fast. Some of that weight will be fat, some will be muscle, some will be bone, some will be organ tissue, and some will probably be brain tissue. That last part I can't back up, but it might be true.
I wanted to share with you a few studies with why you can't be successful with this type of weight loss plan. The first study examined the weight loss effects on resting metabolic rate on morbidly obese clients over 30 weeks. They exercised 6 days a week for 90 minutes a time. The average weight loss came from 47.1kg of body fat and 10.5kg of lean mass. The average baseline resting metabolic rate was 2679 calories in the beginning and dropped to 1890 calories at the end. That is almost a 30% drop in RMR. We start to see hear why short term dieting won't work. You drop that initially weight but if you return to your previous eating habits, you burn significantly less calories at rest, so you are going to put that weight back on plus some.
The second study looked at both obese and nonobese individuals and the effect of weight loss on RMR. They found when the obese group lost 10% of their body weight they saw a drop from 2078 calories to 1778 calories from RMR. For nonobese they dropped from 1511 to 1290 calories per day. This is a pretty significant drop for both groups to experience. It should be noted they were put on a liquid diet of 800 calories. 15% of the diet was protein.
I mentioned the protein amount because there was a similar study changed two things. They put participants on an 800 calorie diet, but it was 40% protein and they had participants perform total body resistance training 3 days per week. How much did their RMR drop? It might sounds surprising but it didn't. In fact in increased. Crazy I know.
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You Stay Healthy San Diego,
Mike Deibler MS, CSCS
