Very Low Calorie Diets
Posted at 13:48 in Food, Training
I hate these. I hate them with a passion. They don’t work in the long term, they don’t teach you new eating habits and there is no way you can nourish your body properly on such a paltry amount of calories.
I actually sympathise with people who are so desperate to lose weight that they would resort to following something like Lighter Life, The Cambridge Diet, Slim Fast, Lipotrim, etc. The one thing these diets have in common is that a huge percentage of people re-gain the weight they lose and most of the time they gain an extra stone or so for good measure.
The sad thing is, desperate people tend to be very blinkered so if someone offers them a way of losing 5 stones in 4 months or 5 stones over 12-18 months, of course, the quicker option is always going to be preferable. However, what they forget is that the longer it takes someone to lose weight, the better chance they have of keeping this weight off. Why? Because the longer you do something, the more it becomes a habit and over a period of 12 months, it’s a habit that is likely to stick. For example, around 4 years ago, I cut out refined carbs. I found they were bloating me and I was starving after eating them. Even when my diet was appalling and I was eating an obscene amount of junk food, I never went back to refined carbs as I had got so used to not eating them.
Following a VLCD or a faddy weight loss plan such as slim fast won’t teach you about nutrition. It won’t teach you what a balanced diet looks like. It won’t teach you why you overate in the first place.
When you eat such a pathetic amount of calories, your body starts to realise it’s starving. In order to survive this famine, it slows down your metabolism. Your metabolism is your body’s natural fat burner, so a slower metabolism means less fat burned. Less fat burned means more fat stored.
What it will do then, is cling onto what food you are feeding it, store it as fat as it has no idea how long this starvation is going to carry on for. Instead, it will start to look to itself and see what it can do without. The first thing to be burned off is your muscle tissue. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue which needs calories to survive. As your body is storing all of the calories you consume as fat, it decides to burn up your lean mass instead. Muscle mass is what regulates your metabolism. So, the more you have, the faster the metabolism and the more food you can eat. The less muscle mass you have the slower the metabolism and the fewer calories your body needs to survive. This is how someone can exist on 1000 calories a day and still not manage to lose weight!
The result of such a diet
A skinny fat body
Slim, yes. Toned? No way! How can you have a nice toned, firm body if your muscle tissue has been obliterated thanks to such a drastic way of dieting? It’s not attractive is it?
I work for a GP and as part of my job, I had to do an audit last year of all the patients that were, or had been, taking orlistat for the previous 12 months. A study of over 30 patients revealed that out of all of them, only 2 people lost weight and kept it off. Over half of them lost weight but re-gained it and the rest actually ended up heavier than when they started.
It won’t come as a surprise to discover the people who managed to keep it off saw the pill as an aid to a balanced, healthy diet and active lifestyle and not a magic pill. They realised the changes they had to make were lifelong and not for a duration, which is what a diet indicates – a start and a stop.
So, how can you lose weight in a healthy way and be sure to keep it off?
First and foremost, don’t create too big a calorie deficit. 10-15% of total calories is often plenty to restrict via the diet to ensure fat loss and muscle preservation. So, if you’re eating 2000 calories to maintain your weight, a 15% deficit would mean restricting 300 from your diet. Create a further deficit of 200 from daily exercise and you have a total deficit of 500 calories, which will equal 1lb of fat lost per week.
Secondly, make sure the food you eat is nutritionally sound. Your body is an amazing creation and you only have one for life – treat it with respect! Don’t waste your calorie intake on empty calories, such as sugar, alcohol and refined carbohydrates. Nourish it with a good range of complex carbohydrates, lean protein, healthy fats, lots of fruit and veggies and plenty of water. Your body will thank you by leaving you feeling revitalised, energised and healthy. You will glow, your skin will be clear, your hair will shine, your eyes will sparkle and you will ooze good health.
I would recommend eliminating processed, convenience and “diet” foods. These offer very little nutritional value to your body and most are often laden with added sugar and salt to make them palatable. Why sit and eat a cardboard frozen lasagne when you can make a delicious one from scratch with nothing nasty added in?
The other thing that I would say is essential to anyone restricting calories is strength training. This stimulates your muscles and encourages them to grow. As you will be restricting calories you won’t make any significant gains in size but training them will preserve what muscle mass you have, thus keeping your metabolism ticking over nicely, whilst your body melts away that fat. A good strength routine done 2-3 times per week is plenty and it needn’t take more than 45 minutes a time. Remember though, for strength and muscle growth, you need to lift heavy so don’t automatically go for the girly 1kg dumbbells, push yourself and work hard. You only need to be completing 8-12 repetitions so choose a weight that allows you to lift that amount and not any more.
What would you rather look like?
Both girls are roughly the same size but their body composition is completely different. The girl on the left clearly has very little muscle mass but a high body fat %, whereas the girl on the right has a lovely “toned” shape with a much lower body fat %.
I know which I’d rather look like!
[...] lovely reader, who is also a distant relative of mine, has told me that she is finally ditching the Cambridge Diet after reading and learning from my blog. She is now going to clean up her diet and eat a balanced [...]
Really cool blog you have here. It would be nice to read more concerning that theme. Thnx for sharing such data.
Even though you read like an automated, spam comment, I will say thank you just in case you aren’t
Hi
Someone recommended your blog on WLR so having checked it out myself and subsequently been inspired by you – who has done the ‘journey’ and understands fitness and health I hope you wont mind me posing some questions to you.
I have had a hellish year where weight loss has been concerned having had a method of contraceptive inserted (and then taken out 6 months later after much begging) and being left with the legacy of 1 stone and 1/2 weight gain. I am one of the women that you refer to who, after a couple of monts of unexplained weight gain (was following another weight loss plan which you referred to on one of your past articles – I did it cos I did it in the past and knew it worked or so I thought) , restricted my calorie intake drastically. Since being with WLR (November timeish) I am having to ‘relearn’ everything I thought I knew about eating and weight loss. In fact, only the past week or so have I been making a concerted effort to eat both my daily allowance and at least half of any exercise calories earned but, it is not without some fear and consternation that I do this. A little voice in the back of my head is saying ‘you’re gonna get fatter’ (I have a stone to lose having had a good loss in the first week which has not been repeated since alas, maybe cos I was barely eating my quota) and I cannot for the life of me get my head around it all. It seems so simple coming from the perspecitve of eating too much/the wrong things but when its the other way round it seems hard to fathom that by eating more it will encourage weight loss. I see that in the past you too have experienced this mentality – how did you get past it? Was it literally ‘experience’ that enabled you to learn from this? Did you (as I suspect I will) put on weight initially and then start losing?
Would greatly appreciate your thoughts/comments on this.
Thanks in advace
Cass
The most common serious side effect seen with VLCDs is gallstone formation. Gallstones, which frequently develop in obese people (especially women), are even more common during rapid weight loss. The reason for this may be that rapid weight loss appears to decrease the gallbladder’s ability to contract bile.
I don’t really suggest a VLCDs.
By definition, dieting is eating the right food, in right quantity, at the right time.
So why starve?!
There have always been fad diets available, such as the “no carbohydrate” diet, the “low carbohydrate diet” and let’s not forget the famous “cabbage soup” diet.
It may look like you are going on a diet that will bring you the results you want, but it does not.
If you ever tried a starving diet, you probably lost some pounds quickly at first, but as time went by, it became much harder to lose the extra weight. Finally, you got to a point that you were actually starving yourself and still not losing weight at all.
Starving diets do not work because they slow down the metabolism and put the body into a starvation mode, making it impossible to lose weight in a healthy way.
I know it because five years ago, I tried such a “diet”. I felt miserable all the time and I was always hungry and tired.
Obviously, after a couple of months I stopped… meaning going back to my regular eating habits… but I had a new problem. You see, when you stop the starving diet, your metabolism is still stuck in a low calorie-burning mode and by the time it catches up, you have gained all the weight back and even a few extra pounds.
The other problem is the loss of muscle mass. As you know, muscle mass is a major part of the body that burns fat, but on a very low-calorie diet you are losing fat as well as your muscle mass. When you stop this diet, you put all the lost weight back on, but you also end up with even more fat and less muscle to burn it with.
Bottom line, IT IS NOT HEALTHY.
Starving yourself will affect your health and damage your kidneys, liver and the rest of your organs. The more you starve yourself, the bigger these problems will become.
There is an alternative that will allow you to eat very tasty foods, but in the right quantities and at the right time, so you can lose weight and be as healthy as you can be.
It is called a BALANCED DIET…
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