stopping eating won’t help you lose weight

Let’s be honest, how many times has this initiative crossed our minds. And it happens that it belongs to the huge myths that exist today. Many men and women, mainly men and women, assume that with prolonged fasting we will lose weight, but it is the opposite.

Cutting calories is not satisfaction. Not, at least, when you want to lose weight and keep it off in the long run. In this case, eating salads and light products is not really the right thing to do, it is not sustainable.at the beginning, this skill is effective. Cutting calories radically does, in fact, make the lack of numerous kilos. However, prolonging this circumstance can end up pushing us into the so-called metabolic tomb.

Metabolic tomb is defined as a drawback produced in the metabolism due to the abuse of diets that are not very good for our body in the long run. We have the possibility of falling into it if we do not make an accurate idealization of the diet and exercise that should accompany it.

The dreaded metabolic tomb. Yes, it sounds like a nightmare and for many athletes it is: they follow a hypocaloric diet and a rigorous training plan and, nevertheless, they do not lose body fat. Like in the movie The Amazing Shrinking Man, but in reverse, instead of shrinking all the time without managing to do anything about it, here it increases.

“Sometimes, the drawback is that many people overestimate the proportion of calories they burn during physical education and underestimate the calories they ingest, so they don’t really have a damaged metabolism as they think, but they are simply consuming more calories than they burn. We tend to assume that we ingest fewer calories, sometimes up to 40%”, warns the professional.

But when stagnation occurs because of excessive daily calorie cuts, Espinar insists, the result is a slowing of the metabolism, leading to lower caloric expenditure. In this way, the body adjusts to the new circumstance, setting in motion a succession of defense mechanisms that prevent it from losing more fat. In fact, this is the cause of the popular ‘rebound effect’, because any excess calories will simply be stored as fat.

TIPS TO AVOID THE METABOLIC GRAVE

• Make a food diary: if we are not sure whether we are eating enough or we are eating too little, it is an incredible help to understand the calories we take in all the time. This periodical will allow us to understand the proportions we take in. We will write them down, at least for a while, and in this way we will have a more or less complete control to achieve our purpose. Not only the meals that we organize, lunch, dinner… but also what we eat between meals.
• Avoid very restrictive diets: they will only lead to the unwanted shock effect. Only you know your goals, that’s why you have to meet them and lose weight little by little. Over time you will lose more fat and in a healthier way than with miracle diets.
• Plan and make a varied training: training without an acceptable organization is not going to do much good, because if you want to achieve your goals you need an acceptable idealization as well as work and patience. If you do cardio it is important that you do a different exercise routine to avoid unwanted metabolic adaptations. Among other things, when going for a run try entering sets in this way as strength exercises for runners.
• Train using weight: in addition to doing cardio to lose pounds you can choose to do weight training to build muscle, because muscle requires calorie consumption to stay “alive”, which means an increase in our metabolism.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE IN THE METABOLIC TOMB

If we enter into a state of metabolic tomb, we need to return our metabolism to normal, recompose the problem, “reset” our body. The best thing to do is to go to a nutritionist, to carry out this reset under the supervision of a professional. He or she will allow us to get out of the metabolic tomb with a specific nutrition: we will increase the caloric intake gradually increasing the consumption of carbohydrates and reducing fats.

In addition, we should ignore long runs and focus on strength work, as it is essential to increase muscle mass. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue that consumes calories mainly from fat. Therefore, the greater the muscle mass, the lower the proportion of fat in the body.