Eat and Lose Weight?

It sounds counter-intuitive - eat more to lose weight - but research is confirming this - especially when you're working out and trying to increase your metabolism. If you deprive yourself of needed calories, your body goes into "starvation mode" and begins to burn calories as efficiently as possible. That might sound good, but if your body becomes too efficient at burning calories, you'll never lose the weight you want to lose.

There's a great article on Beachbody.com about this phenomenon called "Eat More. Lose More. (Really?)"

I know this has happened to me before and it's always confused me. I'll have a day where I'll eat a lot more than I normally do. Sometimes it might consist of "good" calories, but oftentimes, not. The next day, I expect that when I step on the scale, I'll have gained at least a pound or two, but most times, the opposite has happened. I don't know how long it takes for the calories you consume to turn into added weight, but it always has seemed strange to me that I would weigh less the day after I've pigged out and not more. And the opposite has happened, too. I'll eat very conservatively all day long, get on the scale the next day and my weight will be up from where it was the day before. Very, very strange.

The rule of thumb is that to gain a pound, you need to increase your calorie intake by 3500 calories and the opposite holds true to lose a pound. And that doesn't mean that if you eat 3500 calories in a day, you'll gain a pound. It means that if you eat 3500 calories more than what your metabolism uses in a given day, you should gain a pound. So, over time, if you want to maintain or lose weight, you need to eat more calories to have the energy to exercise and then, you need to exercise to burn those added calories to maintain or lose weight.

If you have more information about this phenomenon or have had similar or opposite experiences to what I've had, let me know by posting a comment to this blog post.

Some Links

I haven't posted much lately, but have come across some links I've thought were worth posting here. This first link, I can appreciate from the fitness as well as the photography side of things. The fitness part at the beginning; the photography part during the second half:

A Couple's P90X Transformation Story

This one is just plain funny. If you've been through P90X, you know what it's like at the beginning. Most of us don't want to admit to hard it is - at least not publicly, but this guy definitely tells it like it is. I have to admit, I never was as bad as he describes, but I can definitely relate. (Caution: He uses some inappropriate language, but uses it appropriately.)

Tony Horton and his P90X Wants Me Dead blog post (not mine)

Enjoy!