Spot Toning

“Yep! I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go on a diet and shed these darn pounds once and for all.”

Ever hear yourself uttering something that sounds like this?

And once those words become official, for many of us, something else happens; we want to get rid of those pounds just as soon as possible.

I know this because I’ve gone through the same kind of thing myself in the past. We live in fast times and it’s natural for us to seek fast results. So let’s take a closer look at this desire for “now” results and see where it leads us.

When we want to lose weight fast, most of us think about seriously cutting back on the number of calories we take in.

This is basically the correct line of thinking. Losing body fat is in the most simplistic sense, a matter of eating fewer calories than it takes to maintain the pounds we want to get rid of.

This method of how to lose weight is not the issue. The issue is about how aggressively we try to do this. When we approach the quick weight loss diet in a very aggressive manner, the body believes it is in mortal danger and takes steps to protect itself.

Being conscious, thinking beings, we sometimes find that nature’s priorities run a different course than our own. If life and death are the chips on the table, the consequences of these priorities take on grave proportions (pardon the pun).

Hypothermia for example, is a condition in which the body’s internal temperature drops dangerously low. That situation can arise from exposure to extremely cold external conditions; falling into an icy creek for instance.

The body keeps a kind of emergency plan for various types of life threatening situations. For hypothermia, the plan is to conserve heat. One way to help achieve this end is to shut down the blood supply to non-essential body parts (saves on having to heat the blood). We are probably in agreement with the body about legs and arms as non-essentials. But the body’s “non-essential” list includes the head!!

A similar disagreement between people and nature occurs with severely calorie reduced diets. Since the body believes that it is starving, it starts to do everything it can to reduce energy consumption. There are two approaches to this problem the body takes.

1. The human body is great at adapting to new situations, lowers its Basal Metabolic Rate so that it can keep its fat supply for a longer time.

2. In the face of starvation, the body realizes that muscle is always burning calories, even if it isn’t working. So the body reduces the amount of muscle present so that it can conserve its supply of calories (fat). It does this by literally consuming its own muscle tissue!

The body seems to have converted the fast weight loss program into a fat conservation program. The only opposition to the body’s thrifty attitude about fat was its muscle mass . . . which has now been “eaten” into submission.

Truth be known, the body transformed itself into a fat champion . . . defending the rights of fat cells everywhere.

Obviously what we’ve learned here is to approach calorie reduction in a more gradual manner.

So what would a more conservative approach to dieting look like?

A weight loss plan that would keep the body from thinking “the sky is falling” would have at a minimum:

1. Non-aggressive calorie reduction: don’t cut your calories by more than 20%.

2. A focus on increasing muscle mass through weight training.

3. Some aerobic workouts to increase the body’s Basal Metabolic Rate.

These features are each well covered in many books as individual topics. If you are looking at a diet system that is missing some of these activities, you can always just add them.