Quote:
Originally Posted by rockinrobin
Secondly, not eating enough makes one hold onto weight? Pretty much it's just the opposite. When you take in less calories than you burn, you create a calorie deficit or an underage and the body has to turn to your stored fat to use as energy, thus losing the fat and losing the weight.
The body has other alternatives than burning fat--especially on someone who is already on the low end of a normal BMI. It can lower your body temp, slow your digestion, keep you less active the rest of the day, put you to sleep, burn muscle (including cardiac muscle), stop your cycles (for a woman) or make you so hungry you go off plan. I tend to agree that burning fat is, for most people, the body's "go to" solution, but just because a deficit of X calories leads to Y lbs of fat burned, it does NOT mean that a deficit of 2X calories always leads to 2Y fat burned, so clearly the body does have other options.
For myself, I know that my body will burn about 1% of my body weight a week in fat, but if I create more of a deficit than that my body goes to other solutions--that additional deficit doesn't help me lose weight faster, but it IS more likely to make me miserable and go off plan.