The Less You Eat The Skinnier You Get Myth

The less You Eat the Skinnier You Will Get Myth

Every time I hear one of my clients say to me how many meals they eat, (which ends up being 2 or 3 meals a day) I feel like having a giant big red button that sends off alarm bells! I ask, why don’t you eat more meals throughout the day ?” and the usual reply is always: “I don’t want to get fat.” This day and age, we are living in a society where children and even adults are not educated on how they should be eating and how many calories or portion sizes they are allowed to have. They say to lose weight, you should be eating 1200 calories in order to drop the weight. I hereby say that, that is incorrect. It all depends on your MACROS! Every single person has a different height and weight and based on their metabolic rate, is how you calculate how much you should be eating as well as what training you are doing.

Eating less does not create the need to burn body fat. Instead, it creates the need for the body to slow down. Contrary to popular opinion, the body hangs on to body fat. Instead, it burns muscle tissue, and that worsens the underlying cause of obesity. Only as a last resort, if the body has no other option, it may also burn a bit of body fat. ONLY A BIT!

Repeat after me, the less you eat, the more your metabolism slows down.

Why does the body hang on to body fat and burn muscle? To answer that question, let’s look at it another way.

What does our metabolism want more of when it thinks we are starving? Stored energy.

What is a great source of stored energy? Body fat.

So when our metabolism thinks we are starving, does it want to get rid of or hold on to body fat? It wants to hold on.

Next, what does our metabolism want less of when we are starving? It wants less tissue (which burns a lot of calories). What type of tissue burns a lot of calories? Muscle tissue. So when our metabolism thinks we are starving, it gets rid of calorie-hungry muscle tissue. Studies show that up to 70% of the weight lost while eating less comes from burning muscle—not body fat!

Burning all this muscle means that starving ourselves leads to more body fat—not less—over the long term. As soon as we stop starving ourselves, we have all the calories we used to have but need less of them, thanks to all that missing muscle and our slowed-down metabolism. Now our metabolism sees eating a normal amount as overeating and creates new body fat.

alk about side effects. Eating less was worse than doing nothing.

Why?

After our metabolism is starved, its number one priority is restoring all the body fat it lost and then protecting us from starving in the future. Guess how it does that? By storing additional body fat. Researchers call this “fat super accumulation.” From researcher E.A. Young at the University of Texas: “These and other studies…strongly suggest that fat super accumulation…after energy restriction is a major factor contributing to relapsing obesity, so often observed in humans.”

The most disturbing aspect of fat super accumulation is that it does not require us to eat a lot. All we have to do is go back to eating a normal amount. The Eat Less Group in the study gained a massive amount of body fat quickly while eating the same amount as the Normal Group and the Skinny Group. The metabolism was trying to make up for the past losses.

There is another reason: eating less slowed the metabolism. Put the same quantity and quality of food and exercise into a slowed-down fat metabolism system, and out comes more body fat.

At the end of the day, we are being given numerous of different opinions from each individual and what their intake is on “what’s healthy.” I ask you this: What is diet? Why do we need to follow a diet, to eat right? What is classified the right diet for everyone? As each individual is different, we all have different body shapes as well as different lifestyles. It is finding the RIGHT balance that is suitable to us. My eating plan is completely different to an athletic male, or someone who is shaped differently to myself and is a lot taller than me. Seek advice from a nutritionist, or follow set guidelines your trainer has given you.

Listen to your body and don’t starve yourself to lose weight. Start educating yourself and become a better you!

Tamara Meyer