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Why Might I Have to Eat More To Lose More?
When it comes to kick starting a healthier lifestyle most people are pretty good at identifying areas in their diet, which are holding them back. I mean, eating cheesecake three times a week does make me a better person to be around but it doesn’t do much for my waistline.
However, people aren’t so good at replacing the crap that was once getting them through the day and they are now left with a calorie intake that a worm would struggle to live on.
Calories are not the enemy
Most people, when on the road to weight loss, adopt the mantra of eat less move more and this method works well for weight loss. Unfortunately most people are looking for a lean, toned body that only comes through fat loss. The goal of any good fat loss program should be to hold onto as much muscle as possible whilst losing fat and this brings me to the topic of calories, you know the things pre-programmed to avoid at all costs, well they play a pretty big role here. You see, to hold onto muscle you need calories and to burn calories you need muscle so they are both your friends when looking for fat loss.
Let me break this down, every day our bodies burn calories, the total amount is largely dictated by our activity levels and of course the amount of muscle you have, as muscle is our calorie burning engine.
More muscle = more calories burnt throughout the day
Undernourished
If you go through a prolonged period of under eating and by this I mean eating well below your daily calorie expenditure, then you’re going to lose muscle (lean mass). Your body is designed to maintain balance and it aims to align calorie burning with calorie intake and too little calories results in the wasting of your hard earned muscle.
Less muscle = less calories burnt = slower metabolism = less energy = less fat loss
So what can you do about it?
Unfortunately I’m not going to tell you to put all the crap back in your diet, sorry.
What you need to do is replace those empty calories with nutrient dense calories and by this I mean more of the good stuff.
And last but not least, you need to exercise!
Nobody ever got lean sitting watching Hollyoaks, even if it is the episodes with Pieter in (yes he used to be in Hollyoaks). After all the more you move the more calories you need to eat and eating more was never a bad thing right?
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