Everybody knows that if you want to lose weight you have to make sure that your calorie intake is lower than what your body burns during the course of your natural existence. Exercising is a crucial factor in this since cardio exercises help you burn some of those pesky fats, while weightlifting allows you to increase your lean muscle, thus increasing your metabolism. By increasing your metabolic rate, you’re ensuring that your body burns more calories by default (which is why men have a higher metabolic rate, on average – more lean muscle). However, ultimately if your body burns more than you consume, you will lose weight.
Let’s put this into perspective. If your daily needs are about 1500 calories (totally random example), cutting to 1000 calories per day will cause you to lose weight. This is because your body has to turn to its own resources to compensate for the difference. Consuming 500 calories less than your daily needs will allow you to lose about 1lb a week.
This causes may people to think, “Wait, if I cut it by 500 calories and I lose 1lb per week, if I cut it by 1500 calories I will lose about 3lbs per week. Why don’t I do that?” And thus the process of starvation begins. However, they lose a lot less weight than anticipated. The problem with this notion is that your body doesn’t know that you’re starving it because you want to lose weight and starts cutting your energy expenditure and lowering your metabolic rate. Instead of losing fat, you lose muscle mass, which is probably not what you were aiming for. Moreover, once you start eating normally again, since your metabolism is still really slow, you start gaining weight at a rapid rate.
If you want to avoid all of this, don’t try to take shortcuts. Work out regularly, do cardio, calculate your daily caloric needs and try to consume less than that (but no more than 500 calories less), and get food supplements if you need to, but never starve yourself.
