Eli5: if on a diet why cant someone live off the calories they have stored up as fat before introducing new calories while losing fat? Ie why cant we slim down with exercise before eating more food?
In: 20
From my understanding it’s a throw back to how we evolved. Three meals a day wasn’t the norm (and still isn’t in many places), so our bodies evolved to burn off stored calories, but only to a point. Eventually you’ll go into a different mode where your body saves everything because it doesn’t know when the stores will be replenished. The body slows down the number of calories it burns in an attempt to thwart starvation. It’s why when you diet you periodically hit plateaus. It was a great survival mechanism when we evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, but now it kinda sucks when you need to lose weight.
3500 calories to a pound of fat. vigorous exercise will burn about 10 cal/min so 600 cal/hour, which works out to about 1/6 pound of fat per hour of vigorous exercise.
increasing your metabolic rate by increasing your muscle mass, along with *slightly* lower calorie intake is probably the best way to slim down. consistently eating 2-300 calories less per day and moving more will drop about one pound of weight in two weeks. Keep that up for a year and it’s 20-25 lbs weight loss.
Increasing your muscle mass will slim you down without losing weight, muscle weight is a good thing! And, don’t worry about looking like a bodybuilder. You won’t accidentally break world records running just because you start jogging, and bodybuilders work incredibly hard to look the way they do.
It is actually possible, if you are really fat, cutting out eating at all. Except, you’re gonna miss some vital vitamins and all that other good stuff which makes it not possible.
There was this dude who did not eat a whole year and just got everything he needed per pill. And his calories from his excess fat.
This is him
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/blog/2018/02/story-angus-barbieri-went-382-days-without-eating/#:~:text=But%20spare%20a%20thought%20for,125%20kilograms%20(19.7%20stone).
It IS possible if you get the necessary vitamins and essential stuff (because you need more than just energy form food, you need the building blocks of stuff your body needs).
Anyway, with the supervision of doctors and daily vitamin pills, electrolytes, and amino acid supplements, Angus Barbieri didn’t eat for 382 days. He dropped from 486 to 180 lbs.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast)
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