The wrong way to lose weight (Part 1)

2:00pm….3 more hours, 2:45pm….2hrs 15mins to go, arrrghhhh! something is wrong with the clock!

 It had become a daily painful habit to count down till I allow myself to eat. The wrong thought the being overweight was brought on by overeating caused me to cut down my food intake and painfully rearrange my eating habit. First, I cut out the late-night munching, then reduced my daily meals from 3 to 2 and began to take long walks for exercise.  It wasn’t long before I began to get the “are you sick” comments from people, which only meant whatever I was doing was working. Taking a step further, I started to eat just once daily and my weight fell off rapidly. The best part was the worried look on my mother’s face which only reinforced my anorexic mission and reduced my food intake to naught and yes, the weight kept falling.

However, my joy was short lived, it got to the point I was eating almost nothing but wasn’t losing weight as fast as I should. As the days dragged on and my starving much more serious, my daily thought and nightly dreams became dominated by food and day after day, I would fight the urge to eat in the hopes of losing more weight but still, the number on the scale till did not drop fast enough. After reaching a certain weight milestone, I decided to take a break and eat a little. I gained 5pounds(10kg) within a week and had to starve myself for two months to get it off! . It wasn’t fun anymore; I was starving to death and the weight scale seemed stuck. Something was definitely wrong because the less you eat, the more you lose the weight right? Wrong….

 I figured out after a lot of research that I had been going about it the wrong way and had succeeded in killing my metabolism which only injured my quest to lose weight. I’ll tell you how it works, but first you have to understand the terms in simple “English”

Metabolism: the process by which your body converts what you eat and drink into energy

BMR: Basal Metabolic Rate; The number of calories it would take just to lie in bed all day.

 it represents the amount of energy, usually measured in calories, that your body must burn to keep itself alive while you are at rest and not digesting any food. This varies for different people and could also depend on

Body size and composition: Overweight people are more likely to have a faster metabolic rate — not a slower one.

Sex: Men burn more calories than women of the same age

Age: The older you get, the less calories you burn

It is important to understand that  Even when you're at rest, your body needs energy for functions such as breathing, circulating blood and repairing cells meaning that every single thing you do — from breathing to eating to sleeping — burns calories

That being said, my point is the human brain's first priority is survival, meaning that if you skip meals, your brain receives the starvation signal and hence conserves whatever little food you eat, so instead of burning calories, your body is saving calories and the way it does this is by slowing down your metabolism.

Inotherwords, "Your body is trying to protect you from starvation. Once you start eating normally again, you have a metabolic rebound, and your body tries to hold on to every calorie you eat."

While starving myself, over time, my body adapted to my lifestyle and built a tolerance. Its no wonder I wasn’t losing any weight.

After many months of falling face down on my weight loss goals, i finally have a solution...........

To prevent metabolic rebound, set a realistic goal of losing weight at a rate of about one pound(0.5kg) a week. Remember that one pound of fat is equal to about 3,500 calories, and you need to cut that amount from your diet — or burn it off through exercise — to lose one pound. "That means if you cut back on 500 calories each day, you can lose that 1 pound(0.5kg) a week without shocking your metabolism,"

 Starving actually has the opposite effect over time............

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