HealthSHOULD YOU REALLY STARVE TO LOSE WEIGHT

SHOULD YOU REALLY STARVE TO LOSE WEIGHT

Hear from a functional medicine coach who is also an online fitness coach cum mentor why starving is the worst idea for weight loss.

Should you starve?

The simple answer to this ever-repeating question in your mind is NO. You will probably fail in your weight loss journey, not because of your inconsistency, inability to control, or any other fault on your part, except that you have chosen the wrong way unless if you’re planning on having a weight loss surgery. Read further to understand what would happen to your body when you start starving yourself to lose weight.

To understand what happens in our body during starvation, one has to understand the composition of the human body. The human body is usually composed of fat and nonfat materials such as water, organs, bones, lean mass muscle, protein, and various other components. When you wish to achieve a healthy weight loss, you should focus on losing your fat percentage and try to maintain or increase the lean muscle mass in your body. Muscle is more compact than fat, makes you stronger, prevents injury, burns more calories even at rest, improves flexibility, and more. But, this muscle mass and size get reduced when you starve, and your body fat increases when you are in starvation mode. Starvation also leads to shedding down lean body mass, that is the bone mass, water mass, organs, etc. You are well aware of the fact that a reduced bone mass can make you fall easily as there is no support as your bones get weak, and can lead to fractures and breakages easily. Apart from making your muscle and body mass drop, here are the other adverse effects of starving:

  1. Poor Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR):

When a person has a good body mass, he/she might require more calories to function properly, leading to burning more calories. As starving leads to loss of body mass, continuous starvation can lead to a changed metabolism. Your body starts to store more fat and gets into survival mode. Any food you feed your body, even a little amount, will be converted as fat and stored as it has to fuel during the starving period. Thus, when fat increases and muscle mass decreases, you will have a drop in your weight in an unhealthy way.

  1. Stressed:

Whenever you try to eat less or starve, you will feel hungrier and feel like eating anything and everything. Prolonged calories restriction can increase the release of cortisol, also known as stress hormones. As stress and hunger have a direct connection, you feel more hungry and feel like binge eating. You will be tempted to eat all unhealthy junk that is your favourite, with a plummeted metabolic rate and fail in your weight loss goal.

  1. Poor Health:

When your body and mind aren’t happy enough, it destructs your overall health to a great extent. Feeding your body with extremely insufficient calories, you may experience digestive problems due to lower BMR, experience fast ageing, irregular menstrual cycle for women, low productivity, lack of cognitive ability and creativity, and poor immunity spring valley apple cider vinegar gummies.

To conclude:

We hope this article has thrown some light on what starving would do to your weight loss journey and how it deters our health. Thus, if you are truly looking for foods to avoid, try avoiding junk, fried food items, packed and processed foods, and overeating. Replace them with healthy proteins, naturally available carbs, whole grains, and other food items that are high in nutritional value.

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