Eating too few calories for the efficient functioning of your metabolism ultimately results in more stored fat. This might sound like a contradiction, but eating a calorically deprived diet over a long period of time actually causes the body to begin to hang on to the fat supplies it has and even add to them. Because a steady supply of food was not guaranteed to our hunter-gatherer forebears, the body developed the added ability to slow down the metabolism and store extra fat during periods of famine. If we did not have this ability, we would not have survived the lean times.
This is the primary reason that very low-calorie or starvation diets do not work in the long run. Almost everyone who has ever been on a calorically deprived diet knows that at first the pounds just melt off. But eventually you reach a plateau where you stop losing weight, no matter how hard you try. That is your body’s natural fat-storing survival mechanism kicking in.
Recent studies have even shown an unexpected link between chronic caloric deprivation and obesity. Research conducted by Cornell University and the University of California at Davis have shown the connections between obesity, hunger, and poverty: poor women who periodically go without food so that their children can eat are often obese. The more often you starve yourself to try and lose weight, the slower and less efficient your metabolism will become.
In 1993 I had a client who was a former heavyweight boxing champion who would always be 25 to 45 pounds overweight going into our training camps. Each time we prepared him for a fight, he would be losing the same weight over and over again. This meant that we would have to prolong the usual six-week training period to about three months, which often brought us close to the edge of training burnout. It was a tremendous waste of time and resources to train a quarter of a year because of a simple weight issue.
On one occasion we had been training hard for two weeks and my client had not lost a single pound. This was a serious problem because the fight was only six weeks away. Thinking that low thyroid function might be the cause of his inability to lose weight, my doctor ordered a thyroid test, but the test came back normal.
At this time in my career, I had begun reading studies on metabolism. I consulted with the doctor we were using for this program, and he and I decided to run a simple metabolic activity test on our client. The test results showed that his metabolic rate had been slowed by 30 percent. We discovered the reason was that he wasn’t following the food plan we had given him to help him lose weight and support the intense physical activity of his training program. Thinking it would help him to lose weight faster, he wasn’t eating breakfast and was skimping on lunch. The opposite had occurred. He was tired in training and his body was hanging on to its fat supplies because it thought there was a famine going on. In other words it was slowing down his metabolic rate. At first it was difficult for us to convince him that he had to eat more to lose weight because it went against what he perceived as logic. But as soon as he began eating the proper number of calories and nutrients, he saw the pounds begin to come off.
In his book Turn Up the Heat: Unlock the Fat-Burning Power of Your Metabolism, nutritionist and champion bodybuilder Philip Goglia points out that we are a consistently underfed society: “I have found that most of the people who come to me with weight and health problems are usually already ingesting far fewer calories than they should in order to efficiently fuel their bodies. Therefore, their metabolism, the body’s calorie-burning furnace, is already running 25 percent to 60 percent below its ideal metabolicefficiency level. In turn, the body is storing much of the limited amounts of food these individuals eat as fat and wasting muscle tissue as an adaptive mechanism to create an alternative energy source.”
You have to eat a certain amount of calories per day to lose body fat and preserve and build lean muscle mass. Eating too few calories can even cause your body to cannibalize its own lean muscle to get the nutrients needed for survival.
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