My Dear Readers,

Greetings from Maverick!

Imagine you are stranded on an unknown island with a mere 1000 rupees in your pocket to help you survive till your pick up arrives say, three days from now. In that situation will you spend the entire 1000 rupees to pick up gifts and memorabilia, for your,  family & loved ones back home? Or will you be stringent, in your usage, of that money ensuring that it lasts for your survival over the next 3 days? Naturally our instinct for survival far supersedes any need for fancy gifts. One would rather conserve the resources to survive till help arrives, than spend them on unnecessary things that we believe are not really essential for survival. Do you agree?

In the same way, when your body feels threatened for energy, by not having enough for its daily basic activities, your body will not use up the stored fats. Instead, it will burn healthy muscle tissue for fuel, and store even that up as fat for future use.

When you go on a very stringent diet and exercise a lot, hoping to create a calorie deficit in your body, that is ensuring that your,  calorie intake is far less than the calorie expenditure, you are hoping that, the body will burn the stored fats to make up for the deficit. But unfortunately, this myth has spread a great deal making people believe that 25 years of aberrant eating and stressed lifestyle can be set right by a strict diet and heavy workouts in a span of 4 weeks.That’s not how it works ! Your body is not a profit and loss statement of calorie intake versus calorie expenditure to give you a net profit, or loss. It is more like a balance sheet of genetic assets versus genetic liabilities.

When people go an extreme calorie restrictive diet, most often you will find, all of that bounces back – they regain all their lost weight – and some! This is because, if your body doesn’t get adequate nutrition, it begins to burn healthy, muscle tissue, to make good the deficit in calorie. It will rather, burn muscle and store some of it as fat, than burn fat. Why?

Because it takes the body just 580 kilo calories to burn a pound of muscle. Whereas it takes, 3500 kilo calories to burn a pound of fat! You may think a pound is a pound.  But the process is certainly not the same! So when calories are restricted for normal use by the body, when you don’t have enough energy available to complete your daily chores, when you are stranded with just 1000 rupees for survival, you would rather save the energy of 3500 Kcal required to burn fat and instead burn muscle which just needs 580 kcal.

The role of muscle and the role of fat are very different. Muscles are the furnaces that convert fat into energy. Fat, on the other hand, is the deposit your body collects for lasting survival. So in the process of a starvation diet you do two things simultaneously that are detrimental for your long term health – one, you lose muscle tissues which are the very tools needed to burn more calories, and two you train your body to start storing fat, because it believes it is under threat of survival without enough food! And it is worse for women, because we have far greater number of,  fat storing lipogenic enzymes, than fat burning lipolytic ones!

So what should one eat ideally? Let us see in the next issue…

Yours in wellbeing

Gita Krishna Raj