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Fat Loss

Extreme Diets are not a great strategy

Top 10 reasons to Avoid Extreme Low-Calorie Diets

By Fat Loss
Extreme Diets are not a great strategy

This week I wanted to dig deep into Extreme low carb diets and how the body cant tell the difference between Dieting & Starvation! Hope this info helps you not feel that you need to follow low calorie restricted diets and that eating to burn fat and build muscle should be your goal!

During long periods of starvation, your body slowly feeds off itself for energy, burning through fat stores, then muscle and eventually vital organs. If you continued to burn calories at your normal or higher than normal rate while your food intake fell far below normal, you would quickly exhaust your reserves of stored energy and die soon after your food supply was cut off. Your body’s starvation response keeps you alive longer.

When your body senses calorie deprivation (as some people try to diet with chicken/fish and veggies alone and live off 5-25g or less carbs per day), your survival responses kick in, even though a diet is not a life or death situation. Your body tells itself, “It looks like this is all the food you’re getting for a while, so you’d better stop burning so many calories, start conserving your energy, and increase the drive for finding food.” The longer this happens the more your body and brain begin to slow down the rate of metabolism and the rate at which you ultimately can build muscle or burn body-fat.

The negative side effects of very low-calorie dieting include increases in hunger and food-seeking behaviours, drops in energy or activity level, loss of lean body mass, decreases in metabolic rate, and problems with hormones like hair loss and deficiencies.

Because of this Im going to provide you with the 10 Reasons To Avoid Extreme Low-Calorie Diets! Be sure to share this info with anyone you know how may benefit.

1. EXTREME DIETS INCREASE HUNGER AND FOOD CRAVINGS:

It’s almost impossible to stay on a diet when you’re battling voracious hunger and all you can think about is food. The urge to eat can also be psychological or environmental. You tend to want what you can’t have, so if your diet is too low in calories or it sets too many rules about what you can’t eat, the feeling of deprivation triggers cravings and binges. It’s worse when you’re surrounded by temptations and eating cues all day long.

2. EXTREME DIETS SLOW DOWN YOUR METABOLIC RATE:

Your basal metabolic rate is the number of calories you burn at rest every day. When you lose a lot of weight, you burn fewer calories simply because you have a smaller body. But calorie restriction causes your metabolic rate to decrease even more than a drop in body weight would predict. This is known as “adaptive thermogenesis” and it’s one of the reasons why progress slows over time and why it’s harder for most people to lose those last stubborn 10 to 15 pounds

3. EXTREME DIETS MAY INCREASE THE RISK OF MUSCLE LOSS:

Since muscle burns calories and muscle is extra weight you have to lug around, getting rid of it is an easy way for your body to burn less. Lean people who already have low body fat are more likely to lose muscle than overweight people, but it can happen to anyone. Dieting without resistance training can cause 30 percent to 50 percent of your weight loss to come from lean tissue. The risk of muscle loss or catabolism is higher when most typical female diets /meal plans don’t even have .7-1g p/pound of protein per bodyweight!

4. EXTREME DIETS DECREASE NON-EXERCISE ACTIVITY THERMOGENESIS

Non-exercise activity thermogenesis, also known as NEAT, is the scientific name for all your physical activity throughout the day, excluding formal exercise. Basic examples of NEAT are:  casual walking, shopping, yard work, housework, standing, pacing, and even little things like chewing, changing posture, and fidgeting. Over timeStudies by Dr. James A. Levine at the Mayo Clinic found that when you cut calories, your NEAT level drops. Many people already know that low-calorie diets make them lethargic. Unless you consciously counter this tendency by keeping yourself active, your weight loss will slow down automatically as you keep dieting.

5. EXTREME DIETS DECREASE YOUR ENERGY AND WORK CAPACITY:

As a general rule, low-calorie diets are not conducive to good workouts or an active lifestyle. One of the first signs of undernutrition is loss of energy and the ability to sustain intense training. Without enough fuel coming in, you’ll fatigue faster, your strength will suffer, your performance will plummet, and your results will be compromised. When people hardly eat to lose fat they can hardly train and thats not positive for you!

6 EXTREME DIETS DECREASE THYROID HORMONES:

Since thyroid levels help regulate your metabolic rate, maintaining thyroid function is important for successful fat loss as well as overall health. Endocrinologists have measured reductions in triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) levels as quickly as one week after starting a very low-calorie diet, even before there is a decrease in body weight.  You need that calorie deficit to burn fat, but cutting calories too far—especially when you slash the carbohydrates too low— can wreak havoc with the very hormones you need working at peak efficiency.

7. EXTREME DIETING DECREASE THE HORMONE LEPTIN:

Leptin is a hormone produced  primarily in your fat cells that also plays a major role in regulating metabolism and body weight. Leptin is the hormone that says “its ok to stop eating we are full”. If food intake or body fat stores go down, your leptin levels drop. When leptin is low, it signals your brain that body fat reserves are declining and starvation is impending. This is why leptin is often called the “anti-starvation hormone,” and it may be the hormone that triggers the entire cascade of starvation responses, from increased hunger to reduced metabolism.

8. EXTREME DIETS INCREASE THE STRESS HORMONE CORTISOL:

Cortisol is a catabolic (muscle-wasting) hormone produced by your adrenal glands in response to various types of physical and mental stress, including dieting. Research has shown that cortisol is inversely related to calorie levels.  If starvation dieting and other stressors are causing a hormonal imbalance, you need to address those issues rather than trying to treat the symptoms.

9. EXTREME DIETS DECREASE TESTOSTERONE:

Testosterone also takes a hit when you cut calories too much. This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view because if you can’t even feed yourself, you’re in no condition to bear and feed offspring, are you? In a study from the Journal of Applied Physiology, Army Rangers who were fed only 1,000 calories a day under conditions of stress, sustained wor kload, and inadequate sleep experienced a drop in testosterone that approached castration levels. research says that a conservative calorie cut of 20 percent below maintenance level won’t affect testosterone.

10. EXTREME DIETS INCREASE THE CHANGE OF WEIGHT GAIN:

Almost everyone loses weight at the beginning, but later on, when the weight loss slows down and th e hunger pangs intensify, most people give up. Even worse, they end their diet with a binge. This up-and-down pattern of weight loss and regain is known as weight cycling, and many people suffer through this for years or even their entire lifetime. Not only is it unhealthy, but with each cycle your metabolism becomes less efficient and you may actually get fatter more easily while eating less food than before.

Remember extreme dieting happens all the time, its not just when when people begin fitness programs but this happens all the time when people eat poorly over a holiday and then goes 2-3 weeks eating not carbs and trying to cut weight fast.

We help professionals & parents with kids shed fat and build muscle without having to do starvation diets or endless cardio sessions. If you’re new to exercise or seeking that athletic, active and lean physique and not sure where to start? Click the box below to set up a free Discovery Call to help guide you through, What your Body Type is and what’s the best program and nutrition for you!

Who is Pure Motivation Fitness?

  • We help busy business professionals & stressed moms & dads look better naked, regain their work-life-family balance & improve sex drive in less than 90 days.
  • We teach you to eat & exercise for your unique body-type.
  • No more obsessing about fitness
  • No more fad diets

Are You Ready to Take Action and Get Started? Have A Question About COVID Safety or Pricing?

Take charge of your fitness & nutrition today. Click the BUTTON BELOW to schedule a complimentary Discovery Call and together we will plan your 90-day of body transformation.

Can You Target Certain Areas Of Your Body For Fat Loss Pure Motivation Fitness

Can You Target Certain Areas Of Your Body For Fat Loss

By Fat Loss
Can You Target Certain Areas Of Your Body For Fat Loss Pure Motivation Fitness

Hope you’re feeling, looking, and acting like a million bucks!!!

With so much information out on the internet (and coming from friends and family), it’s pretty difficult to tell fact from fiction. It is incredibly important to learn the truth and be able to distinguish between the two.

One of the biggest exercise “myths” out there is that you can lose fat in an area of the body by strength training or exercising that specific body part. Oh how much easier life would be if this was true! The truth is, that we cannot dictate from where our bodies will decide to oxidize fat, nor can we change fat into muscle. Bummer, I know! Doing triceps press-downs will not decrease the amount of fat on your arms any more than doing crunches will decrease the amount of fat we may have in our mid-section.

How can that be? Your body is one, complex, interconnected machine that is comprised of many moving parts. While fat can manifest itself in certain areas over others on your body, you have to exercise all of it as a whole to see results anywhere. You can do crunches every day for a month, even twice per day but it will not be able to remove the body fat in your midsection any faster or easier than you following a customized meal plan for your body type which consists of staying within a caloric deficit and burning more than your consuming daily…Period, don’t believe anyone else telling you otherwise!

Muscle is muscle, and body-fat is body-fat, two distinct and different tissues that are responsible for different tasks. Many are confused and sometimes fooled that body-fat tissue can sometimes be turned into muscle with lots of new exercise and dieting but that’s the furthest from the truth and the biggest lie forget myth!

There are some areas of our bodies that genetically hold more body-fat (adipose tissue) than others, for example, love handles vs. hamstring body fat (at the back of the legs) or some men who are overweight and have high levels of estrogen have gynecomastia (enlarged nipple glands due to high body-fat percentage) in the upper chest areas but can lose body-fat faster in the midsection when they train. That doesn’t mean they are doing more abs, or planks it just means they are losing body-fat faster in the areas it is stored higher or in larger amounts.

Don’t be fooled! Here is the silver lining: any exercise that decreases your overall body fat percentage will help you lose fat and tone your body as a whole. These are some exercises that are can produce a greater thermogenic effect or caloric expenditure for you:

  • Compound Multi-Joint exercises that involve more than 1 muscle & joint at the same time (Squat, Bent Over Row, Dumbbell Thrusters)
  • HIIT Training provides higher intensities at shorter rest and interval durations with coupled exercises back to back
  • Active Rest or recovery exercises are great for increasing resting heart rate (skipping, jogging, boxing in between sets)
  • Plyometrics or Explosive exercises that require you to move our body over distance or objects (box jumps, hurdle jumps, jump knee tucks, donkey kicks)

If you are Mesomorphic or Endomorphic in body type doing HIIT exercises is my favourite because they increase your metabolic burn to a point where you can continue to burn fat for up to 72 hours AFTER you leave the gym. If that’s not a plus, I don’t know what is!

But remember, you CANNOT spot reduce body-fat. The human body will shed fat all over and if you have less in your arms than your tummy, then you will notice less changes in your arms and more in your tummy due to the disposition of it. And, after a few weeks or months of training if you notice your tummy is taking forever to go away its also because it takes longer to lose body-fat in areas that have the fattest tissue stored so keep up the hard work and know that body-fat can be burned off but needs time and consistent caloric deficit. Fat loss is not magic, it’s just dedicated hard work with consistency over time!

If you’re new to exercise or seeking that athletic, active and lean physique and not sure where to start? Click the box below to set up a free Discovery Call to help guide you through, What your Body Type is and what’s the best program and nutrition for you!

Who is Pure Motivation Fitness?

  • We help busy business professionals & stressed moms & dads look better naked, regain their work-life-family balance & improve sex drive in less than 90 days.
  • We teach you to eat & exercise for your unique body-type.
  • No more obsessing about fitness
  • No more fad diets

Are You Ready to Take Action and Get Started? Have A Question About COVID Safety or Pricing?

Take charge of your fitness & nutrition today. Click the BUTTON BELOW to schedule a complimentary Discovery Call and together we will plan your 90-day of body transformation.

Fat Loss Vs Weight Loss Pure Motivation Fitness

Fat Loss Vs Weight Loss

By Fat Loss
Fat Loss Vs Weight Loss Pure Motivation Fitness

Many people start on a fitness journey with the sole purpose of losing weight and seeing the number on the scale get smaller. I always love to hear when people are making an honest go of it to improve their overall health, but setting out to solely lose weight is a misguided journey.

Let’s talk about the difference between fat loss and weight loss.

Fat is the substance that your body uses to store excess calories found in all the foods you eat. Typically, when you lose excess fat, you also lose weight. Sometimes, though, you can maintain or even gain weight. The truth is that through strength training, you will build up lean muscle while also helping you shed excess fat through aerobic exercise. The more muscle that you build, the more fat you can burn. Furthermore, the more muscle you have the higher your metabolism will be and the more metabolically active your body will become.

Muscle weighs more than fat so losing weight is great but building muscle should be the focus. We need healthy, metabolically active tissue. Remember with age it will shrink so you need to think about building muscle not just losing weight.

It’s a known fact that after the age of 35 a female will lose 1 lb of muscle per year and a male will lose 1/2 lb of muscle as well so it’s vital to understand and make sure you are not just looking at total weight and understand internal composition.

This should be a no-brainer, then, your weight should go down through exercise and strength training, right? Not necessarily. Muscle is more dense than fat, so my advice to you is NOT to get fixated on a number on the scale. It is NOT an accurate measurement of your overall health. If you’re truly setting out to improve your health and not just lose a few pounds here and there, then you should work on changing your overall body composition. Increasing your lean tissue-to-fat ratio indicates a more positive overall fitness level and optimal general health which is more important than the number on the scale.

For example, a female that is 5 feet 5 inches tall, 35 years old that weighs 140 with a body fat percentage of 31% will have:

  • 43.4 lbs of Fat Mass (Strictly Adipose (Fat) Tissue on her body)
  • 96.9 lbs of Lean Mass (All internal tissues, organs, bone and brain)

After 30 days of exercise she noticed that she lost 7 lbs while following an extreme low carb diet and doing only cardio every day with no weights at all. Her body comp at the end of 30 days showed her at 133 lbs with a body-fat of 29%, this equates to:

  • 38.57 lbs of Fat Mass (previously she had 43.4 so good job)
  • 94.43 lbs of Lean Mass (previously she had 96.9 lbs so not so good here)

The goal in fitness is to build lean mass and lose body-fat as we need muscle to keep us stronger as we age, increase our metabolism and ensure we maintain as much muscle as we can.

There are a number of cardio and strength training activities that can be used in tandem to help you achieve your health and fitness goals. But, your best bet would be to have a well thought out plan that not only involves aerobic and strength training, but also a nutritional overhaul.

Contact us if you are ready to take that next step. We are here to help!

Who is Pure Motivation Fitness?

  • We help busy business professionals & stressed moms & dads look better naked, regain their work-life-family balance & improve sex drive in less than 90 days.
  • We teach you to eat & exercise for your  unique body-type.
  • No more obsessing about fitness
  • No more fad diets

Are You Ready to Take Action and Get Started? Have A Question About COVID Safety or Pricing?

Take charge of your fitness & nutrition today. Click the BUTTON BELOW to schedule a complimentary Discovery Call and together we will plan your 90-day of body transformation.