The Starvation Response
I have a mathematical background and the whole things with calories consumed versus calories burned off used to really confuse me. When I read Tom Venutos amazing book “Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle” it finally started to make sense:
Rob Faigin, writing in the book “Natural Hormonal Enhancement,” makes a humorous, but true observation about calorie balance and weight loss.
Faigin says, “If there existed an airtight mathematical relationship between caloric intake and weight loss, cutting caloric intake from 3000 to 1000 would result in a 60,000 calorie per year deficit – and would result in a 200 pound weight loss after a year. What if the person began the diet weighing 200 pounds, would he disappear?”
We all know that people can survive for months without food and the Starvation Response is the reason why- when the food we eat gets cut back drastically, we hold onto our fat reserves and also try to convert the maximum amount that we eat into fat. This way we’ll survive.
It is for this reason that severely low-calories diets don’t work! You’re actually invoking a mechanism that causes your body to store the maximum amount of fat!
Tags: starvation response
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