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Lose Weight Too Fast and you Might get Raped by a Llama
By Kenny | January 25, 2008
We’d all like to be able to lose 20lbs by the end of January, but this is just not practical or healthy. To be healthy, the most weight you should be losing is about 2 lbs per week at first, and then maybe 1 pound per week after that, then less and less per week as you get closer to your goal/ideal weight. If you are losing weight faster than this, then you are headed for disappointment and sadness.
Your body has a very sensitive survival meter and if it senses that your not getting enough water, or not getting enough air, or about to be raped by an AIDS infected llama, it will react and adapt to help make sure you survive whatever plight or threat is looming. Your body really only cares about your survival. The same goes for food. If you body senses that you are not getting enough food, it will switch your metabolism to “OFF” and it will actually retain fat stores and burn muscle for fuel as a precautionary measure.
Screw that. If you are dieting and doing a lot of cardio, the initial results you are seeing (aside from overall water loss) are a loss of 65% fat (good) and 35% muscle (not good). This loss of muscle tissue is what will screw you in the end. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue meaning that your body has to burn extra calories just to sustain it. Not only that, but muscle weighs more than fat and is where a ton of water is stored so when you lose heavy, healthy, waterlogged muscle, you’ll definitely see it on the scale and you’ll tell yourself, “Good job, I’m losing weight! I rule! I want to have sex with myself!” but in reality, all you’ve accomplished is tricking your body into thinking there is no food around. So your body starts conserving it’s fat stores, burning muscle for energy and shutting your metabolism down. With your metabolism running slower and slower, you have to eat less and less to lose more weight. Your brain chimes in and tells you it wants you to eat more, making you hungrier, and it’s impossible to stay the course. Soon your so hungry, tired and weak, That you can no longer fight off the advances of that llama. 
Tired, depressed and limping, you go back to your old eating habits and with your new found slow metabolism, you gain all the weight back and get even more depressed and fat and you end up starting some bullshit blog.
Trust me, you don’t want to end up like this.
We need to commit to losing weight in a healthy manner that doesn’t force our bodies to adapt and put us in fat retention mode. Simply put we have to eat a little less and exercise a little more over a long period of time, if we hope to lose weight and keep it off. By ‘eating a little less’, I mean less calories with more protein and by ‘exercise a little more’, I mean a lot more using a combination of cardio and weight training. Yes weight training. If you are not training with weights as part of your ‘fat loss’ program, then you might as well strip down and climb into the llama pen right now.
More on that later. The weight training part I mean. 
Topics: Weight Loss Challenge 2008 |