The Low-Calorie Diet

• A lower than normal caloric intake does several things right away. First, the body changes its focus from burning carbohydrates and fat to storing fat and burning lean tissue or muscle to give it the calories it needs to function. After that, the depleted muscle mass leads to a lower metabolic rate so that the body will need fewer calories to work properly. This is the body's defense against starvation. When you're dieting, though, it tends to just shift your body weight from muscle into fat stores, which is not effective for either your diet or your health. Further complicating the problem is the fact that when you stop dieting, any weight you have lost will usually come back as fat. This means that you have shifted muscle to fat and then put on even more fat. Nutrition experts believe that different people need different amounts of calories, but generally you should never go below 1,000 to 1,200 calories to avoid this starvation effect.
  
  

High Exercise

• While it depends on what exercise you do, you must consider the value of a pound in calories and compare it to how much you actually burn when working out. A pound is 3,500 calories, which means that in order to burn off a pound of weight (which will be a combination of muscle and fat) you would have to exercise off 500 calories per day for a week. Many people believe that a pound a week is too little, and thus they think that the exercise is not working. Another problem is that most exercise machines poorly estimate the amount of calories you expend during a workout. A 1998 study showed that the estimated calories burned during a workout on a machine were 255, while the actual calories burned were 187. Add this to the common misconception that exercise raises your metabolic rate. Studies have shown that even six months of aerobic exercise do not raise your metabolism. A combined look at 25 years of studies at George Washington University Medical Center even showed that adding aerobic exercise to a low-calorie diet was only a slight change compared to the low-calorie diet alone.
  
  

Conclusion and Alternatives

• Since a low-calorie diet slows metabolism, and a large amount of aerobic exercise has little to no effect on metabolism, there is a chance that a diet combining the two may not give you the results you want. This is especially true if you have only a few pounds to lose as opposed to a few hundred. One alternative to this plan is a change in objective. Do not try to lose weight, keep your calorie content above 1,200, exercise frequently and watch your health improve. Even if you aren't losing weight, you may increase your capacity for exercise and over time you'll be able to take on exercise that can have a greater effect on your metabolism. Another idea is to increase your calories and spread them out over five or six smaller meals. This has been shown to raise metabolism and it may be more effective when combined with exercise than your low-calorie diet. Lastly, shifting your focus to being happier in your own skin than the skin of who you want to look like, may make you feel more positive and help you to enjoy life just the way you are.