Recently I was asked politely by a dieting website to stop posting my strong dieting opinions because they might border on being unsafe, as well as may not be beneficial for everyone. My advice:
- Watch your salt, fat, cholesterol, and sugar intakes
- Exercise - especially adding in weights or resistance bands to build more muscle tissue so the body burns more calories
- Provided links to training logs, various calculator tools, and recipes
- Don't over hydrate (also known as water intoxication)
- Avoid processed foods (packaged or canned) as much as possible and choose fresh or frozen instead
- How to calculate maintenance calories and how to add in additional ones to fuel your workouts?
- What's a plateau and how to restart your stalled weight loss?
- What's a safe amount of weight to lose per week?
These are common sense things any physician and/or health club trainer would tell you, so I'm not sure why my repeated advice is now “dangerous” and “not beneficial for everyone”. In the end, I closed my account with them and moved on.
I will not name the old site, nor will I name the new one I'm on, but one thing's definite: bad eating and eating disorders abound everywhere, spewing all sorts of bad advice. I saw a post headline where the person said they had lost 58 pounds since January (as I'm writing this, it's March 4th). I glanced over it a bit and then wrote why it wasn't safe to lose a pound a day. I missed on the full post “….lost 58 pounds since January 2007”, and I promptly got my butt kicked for not cheering on someone's weight loss. I did go back and correct my mistake, and it taught me not to comment when I'm trying to do two things at once and in a hurry, but it got me thinking about a trend on the dieting websites I've seen.
Many times I've seen people I'd mentally tag as an eating disorder (ED) personality and watch the kind of advice they'd spew. It would range from diet pills, to cabbage soup, to juice only diets, and end up with “I eat only 800 calories a day”. Considering 600 is starvation, I'm not sure what these people are really trying to accomplish. Then they'd later come back and post, “Why am I not losing any weight?”
The starvation response kicks in when your calories dip below your basic metabolic rate (the minimum number of calories one needs to breathe, walk, digest food, think, etc.). The brain tells the body to “lock” the fat onto your frame until the “famine” is over. Your fat is not fat to your brain - it's a rich source of stored energy is it attempting to ration to keep you alive until the “feast” time kicks in. When the body senses the starvation period is over, it releases its “lock” on the fat stores and uses them for fuel.
Your body doesn't know you're dieting as the feast and famine response is hard wired into your DNA, and that's where your tug of war with the scale begins. You think cutting calories and exercising until you drop dead will work, but if you neglect to feed your body, it will store the calories, and often times you'll register gained weight instead of a loss.
I did this once as part of a religious fast. I didn't lose any weight….in fact, I gained two pounds. One of my good friends said to me later, “You're the only person I know who could fast and gain weight! It's like Teddy Kennedy when he went to Africa to see starving children, and he gained weight on the trip!” I know exactly why this happened as it was a total fast, and as I've since come to understand, breaking a fast with a big meal can be deadly. You have to go on it slowly, and come off the same way. When I came off, I got a spicy chicken sandwich, fries, and a coke at Wendy's….NOT smart for a whole host of reasons, but I didn't know any better back then.
All too often these dieting websites are a haven for ED women who are looking to lose weight. I can't tell you how many times I was scared to read the weight loss ticker at the bottom of the boards that read 100 pounds or less. On the newest site, I saw a woman who wanted to cut her calories down, and when I ran the numbers, her dietary cut would be around 100 calories, or she'd have to work out a few times a week, and nothing too strenuous at that. She was seeking advice to lose at least 10 pounds. Another woman was 112 pounds and wanted to lose weight.
