Does Not Eating Make You Lose Weight?

Weight Loss Isn’t Rocket Science, Is It?

At the simplest level, weight loss doesn’t seem too complicated. If you eat less, you’ll start to weigh less. In reality, healthy weight loss is much more complex.

Does not eating make you lose weight? At first, yes. If you eat very little, or stop eating completely, your body will enter a fasted state. In the short-term, this will cause you to lose both fat and lean muscle mass, and quite quickly at that. However, if you’re hoping for long-term fat loss, starving yourself is completely counterproductive.

Your body is much smarter than most people think. When you eat less food than your body needs, your body very quickly realizes this. It immediately kick-starts something called “starvation mode.” This is a mechanism that has been developed by the body over millions of years of evolution.

What Do Cave Men Have To Do With It?  

In the early days of man, it wouldn’t be uncommon for someone to only get around 5 meals per month. After all, when you have to hunt and gather for your food, you never really know when your next meal is going to come. Due to this uncertainty, the body was forced to make use of what little food it did get in the most efficient way possible. The body learned how to stretch the calories it did get from food over a much longer period of time. It stored these calories in fat stores within the body, and it would do its best to make these calories last as long as possible, slowing the loss of the body’s fat stores . Without a dependable food source near by, the only energy it could depend on was that which was held on its own body.

In order to do this, the body had to slow its calorie-burning metabolism. This is what’s known as starvation mode, and it’s the same thing that happens to your body after just a few days of eating too little food.

A Big Mistake

While people often eat very little with the hope of losing unsightly body fat, they generally end up with the opposite result. Not only will fat loss end up slowing due to starvation mode, it’s next to impossible to stay on a crash diet for long enough to have a positive effect on fat loss.

Your energy will spiral downwards, you’ll get headaches, your friends and family will notice how irritable you have become, and you will be miserable. Starving yourself is not sustainable. Eventually, when you realize that you’re not getting your desired results from eating very little, you’ll begin to eat normally again.

Unwanted Results

When you do begin eating food again, your body won’t know what to do with it. Your metabolism will have slowed down because of your previous fasting, and the food you do eat will very quickly turn to fat.

The body weight you lost while starving yourself will come back with a vengeance, and for many people, they’ll gain even more weight than they had to begin with. Does not eating make you lose weight? I hope you know now that this couldn’t be farther than the truth.

For fast, healthy fat loss, it’s best to implement a program of exercise and nutritional eating. Check out some of the other posts for more information.