I heard that if you don’t eat for a week, and then if you start to eat, your body will store more fat because it thinks that food is getting scarce, therefore fasting is not a reliable way of losing weight.
But if we eat Dietary Fiber vegetables (food that we cannot fully process) instead of literally starving ourselves, then does the body say “oh look, the stomach is full, therefore no need for storing fat” ?
Does this mean that if i make my diet 70% vegetables and 30% soup, will i start to lose weight?
In: Biology
Well, you’ll almost certainly lose weight but probably not the kind you want to lose.
When there’s no food, your body starts looking for food sources. The easiest and most readily available energy source, of course, is your own body. But it doesn’t think, “Well, look at all this fat. Let’s eat that.” No, it wants high quality food so it goes for your muscles first. This is why weight loss is usually done wrong for most people because they figure if they don’t eat they’ll lose weight. And they will but their bodies are eating their muscle rather than their fat and while most people don’t realize it, they want to keep their muscle and get rid of their fat. Consequently, when you reach some arbitrary weight on a scale, you’ve still got just as much fat but a lot less muscle so you start eating normally again, get fatter *and* rebuild your muscle. Invariably, you just wind up fatter.
So what makes muscle a better source of energy than fat from your body’s perspective? Well, it provides far more energy than the fat you’ve got stored. It’s got everything you need to build….wait for it…muscle! ha ha. Your body wants sources of energy that include protein et cetera. Fat doesn’t have nearly as much of what your body needs because you can’t store vitamins and minerals like you can carbohydrates. But you break down muscle, well, it’s got everything you need to keep your body running. Well, except that it runs out and then you’re messed up.
Obviously, of course, your body will eventually turn to fat because it knows when it reaches a limit on how much muscle it can eat and still operate normally.
The problem with vegetables is that they don’t tend to contain enough protein to keep your body running optimally. That’s why vegans have to find alternative sources of protein such as beans and nuts.
There’s nothing wrong with having a heavy plant-based diet but you still *need* a good source of protein in there. Lots of soy and nuts and you should be fine. Also, you have to be careful because you process liquids much more quickly than solid food and, as a result, you find yourself feeling hungry more often which in turn causes you to eat more soup such that, well, if you’re not careful, you wind up getting more carbohydrates than you did when you didn’t have that diet.
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