Scientists have been shoving it down our throats for years, and by now pretty much everyone knows that losing weight is all about the calories. If you want to see a reduction in your body fat, you need to burn more calories than you are ingesting every day.
Forcing your body to dig into its own fat resources to accommodate its energy needs is, aside from surgery, the only way to drop the fat. However, making that happen is a bit more of a complicated process, but many people ignore that.
As a result, they have taken the above theory to certain extremes, with many people deciding that fasting for weight loss is the best way to go; they won’t be taking in any calories at all, meaning the body will always have to dig into its resources for its energy requirements.
Just like most ambitious plans, this one sounds logical until it is put to the test.
Is Fasting for Weight Loss Practical?
On top of requiring calories in order to function, your body also needs a large number of nutrients to support the different processes happening within itself. To remain strong and healthy, you need iron, dozens of vitamins and minerals, fats, carbohydrates, proteins, fibers, and much more.
As you can guess, the body doesn’t keep those ingredients in reserve as it does fat, meaning that by fasting you are actually going to be making your body less and less healthy with each passing day. At some point, your immune system won’t be able to function properly any more, leaving you wide open to any number of nefarious diseases.
But let’s pretend for a second that nutrients aren’t a problem, and that you have managed to fast for a certain amount of time and have a lost a lot of weight. At this point, two questions need to be asked:
Where did the lost weight come from?
How long will you be able to keep up these results?
To answer the first question, while it is true that much of the lost weight will have come from fat, some of it will be important lean muscle mass, and losing muscle doesn’t make you healthier in any way.
As for the second question, simply imagine the moment at which your diet ends and you discover that you have lost, say, twenty pounds. What is the first thing you are going to do?
Chances are that you will want to gorge yourself in a ton of food. Well, putting aside the fact that your stomach would simply burst for not being used to digest anything for a while, you will also find all of the weight you thought to have lost.
Once the diet will be over, your body will do everything in its power to get itself out of the state it considers to be abnormal in order to return to how things were before you started fasting for weight loss.
All things being said and done, fasting for weight loss is definitely not the way to go, regardless of how bad you want results; in the end, you will only end up hurting yourself with the weight coming right back on, minus the muscle loss, as fast as it left your body.