Starve Yourself and Gain Fat

Author: Tommy Leung | 09/11/2008 | Diet, Fat Loss

Perhaps it is illogical to think that not eating will actually force your body to store more fat. The fact is, starving yourself is going to trigger your body to go into survival mode. Instead of doing what you want it to do–lose fat–it’ll do the opposite to keep you alive. That is more important than looking like a model, right?

If you have ever tried any sort of starvation diet you should know that it doesn’t work and probably made things worse. I like food so I can’t imagine starving myself. It’ll just be horribly painful. I will assume that most people enjoy eating food as well. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are all common get-together events with friends and family. Not only is a starvation diet highly inconvenient, it is also going to place a damper on the joys of life. What good is being thin if you have to sacrifice such a fundamental part of life?

Ironically, starvation diets don’t make you thin. It leads to muscle destruction and it is muscle that helps you tear through extra fat. If you start dropping weight by not eating, it will mostly be a loss of muscle. Muscles require energy to exist. Calories are energy. So muscles will burn calories just by lying around. Because of that, muscle will be the first to go.

Back in ancient times when man had to hunt and kill his food, food was a lot more scarce. The rabbit might get away one night and there would be no dinner. You never knew for how long you would go without getting enough to eat. Fat is a store of energy that doesn’t require much energy to keep around so the human body does the only intelligent thing: it keeps the fat.

The longer you can survive, the better your chance of finding the next meal. We didn’t climb up the food chain by being evolutionary rejects. The human body knows how to survive–it has done it for millions of years. Today, there is more food than we need and we need not even bring our own spears.

Knowing that starvation leads to more fat storage–not less–we can design diets that facilitate the use of fat as energy. Diet gurus have been promoting this idea for many years now. You want to eat more than just three square meals a day. Several small meals spaced throughout the day will raise your metabolism and tell your body that food is in abundance so don’t keep any fat!

The idea is not to eat five or six versions of a meal from a three meals a day plan. If you usually consume 1000 calories a meal, eating five of those will give you 5000 calories a day. Unless you are an athlete, you don’t need that much food.

What you want is to eat five 500 calorie meals. So where you would have consumed 3000 calories eating three 1000 calorie meals, five 500 calorie meals will be 500 less calories. Those kinds of savings will help you lose a pound a week by merely tweaking the size and amount of meals you eat.

So how do you go about doing this? It will be quite difficult to count calories and prepare meals that fit the calorie criteria. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands or a personal chef–I would love that, the best bet is to try meal replacement shakes.

It also does not have to be five 500 calorie meals. You can mix up the numbers as long as it still falls into a total calorie amount that is less than what you eating now. A meal replacement diet might end up being seven 300 calorie meals. The math tells us that it works even better than five 500 calorie meals.

Remember, the worse thing you can do if you want to lose weight is to starve yourself. It might work for a few pounds but, the long term result is quicker weight gain in the future. It is a losing strategy. There are better ways to reduce your daily calorie consumption. A diet should not be unpleasant. We didn’t struggle for millions of years hunting giant mammoths with stone spears to purposely starve ourselves today.

If it doesn’t feel good, it probably isn’t good for you.

By Tommy Leung