Should You Lose Weight Fast?
When you have been happily getting on with your life for all this time and then one day you overhear a work colleague talking about how fat you’ve become lately to another person, it can bring you down to Earth with a very unkind bump. You may not have even noticed the extra weight creeping up on you over so much time, but on closer inspection, you realize the awful truth is that those unkind words were not spoken in jest. The natural reaction to such a discovery is to stop eating just about everything in a vain attempt to shed some weight as fast as you possible can.
You get online and start reading up on as many of the rapid weight loss tips that you can find and are determined to put them into action. But is this the right way to go about losing weight?
Just picture the scenario for a moment. Before they figured out how to farm and keep livestock for food, our early cave dwelling ancestors had to rely on catching their food to survive. That was no easy task, especially with inadequate weapons and sketchy at best hunting skills. They could go many days without food and then get lucky with a substantial kill. Then the family or tribe would eat heartily, gorging themselves on the sudden supply of abundance until it was all gone. Then it would be another wait for the next kill when the tribe could satisfy their hunger once more.
How did those ancestors survive through the times of no food, which could go on for many days or even weeks?
Our bodies are instinctively programmed to store food as fat in times of plenty to get us through the subsequent lean times, while slowing he metabolism so we use less energy. We still carry those ancestral instincts today, although we rarely if ever have to endure such lean times. What generally happens is we have too much food to eat and our bodies happily store the excess in preparation for the lean times, which never come. So we gain weight and eventually become obese.
Let’s return to the situation at hand. Suddenly you stop eating to try and lose weight, but what happens? Your body simply goes into starvation mode and ekes out the bare minimum of its stored energy so you can survive. You may lose weight rapidly at first, but the rate of weight loss slows dramatically after a few days. As soon as you start eating normally again, your body straight away starts preparing for the next lean time by storing as much fat as it can. You gain all the weight back fast plus a few pounds extra for your trouble!
As you can see, this is not a good way to get slim and is prone to failure most of the time. It is far better to lose weight slowly in a structured, measured strategy of a sensible low calorie diet coupled with some daily physical exercise to boost your metabolism and maintain a steady rate of weight lost over time so that in the long term you can keep it off and enjoy a slimmer, healthier body because of it.