Lose weight due to a caloric difference

To lose weight it can help not only to eat differently, but also less. After all, everyone knows: if you eat fewer calories than you consume, you fall off. For those who eat more than they need, it is true that it is healthy to lose weight by not eating more than you need. The annoying thing about just eating less is that you cannot continue doing this endlessly while maintaining your health. At a given moment it is no longer smart to eat even less.

Example

Suppose that you need 2000 kcal per day but that you ate 3000 kcal per day during the last years. As a result, you have obviously become too heavy. You decide to drop off and reduce your intake to 1500 kcal per day. In the beginning you fall off a lot, but after a few months this stops, while you still have a few kilos of fat too much. What happened? Your body is used to the new amount of calories. Because you no longer eat too much you will no longer become heavier. When you still want to lose more weight, you decide to eat less, for example 1300 kcal. But even now, the effect goes out after a certain period and you end up on a plateau again. How did that happen? Apparently there is no longer a caloric difference for your body after a few months. If you do not know too much about it, chances are you decide to eat even less. Let's say 1200 kcal per day. How long do you keep that? The day will come when you will eat more. You also need more. If you then go from 1200 kcal to 1500 kcal you will arrive again. Your energy management is totally upset.

Caloric difference

A difference in calories means that you eat fewer calories than you were used to. If you eat 3000 kcal today and tomorrow 2000 kcal then there is clearly a caloric difference. But if you subsequently eat 2000 kcal for a few months, is there still a caloric difference? The period from when you ate 3000 kcal is already so far away. When you stop losing weight, your body no longer experiences that caloric difference and finds it a way to 'get around' with the new amount of kcal.

Overdid

In prehistoric times, it was of course not the case that we ate the same amount of calories every day. In fact, we have developed the ability to store fat because we sometimes had periods of scarcity. The idea is that you eat more than you need and store the excess as fat. When there is a period of scarcity, you can appeal to that fat and survive. You can also see the same pattern with current hunter-gatherers. For example, the weight of! Kung people from Africa is about 2 to 7% (0.5 to 4 kilos) of the total weight between the dry and the wet season.

If that is our biology then the answer is of course simple.

The trick

What should you do to maintain the caloric difference for a long time? The solution is simple. By eating less on an irregular basis, you prevent your body from getting used to it and the caloric difference remains intact. Your body experiences the 'I-get-less-than' feeling time after time. This way of effective weight loss is already very old, even in paleo circles. In the book "The Sone Age Health Program" by Boyd Eaton, Melvin Konner and Marjorie Shostak (all of whom are great names with several scientific publications to their credit), an example has already been discussed. This book is from 1989, more than 25 years old. The way they recommend is the first way from the list below.

Effective ways to eat less

There are several ways to lose weight effectively by eating less, while maintaining the caloric difference.

• 2 months 'lines', 3 months not. This method comes from the just mentioned book by Boyd Eaton. It is recommended to eat less for two months, then normal for 3 months, then two months less and so on. Until the desired body composition is achieved.
• Another well-known and proven method is the fast food diet where you eat less than two days a week than the other five days. More information can be found in my blog article about the Paleo-Vastendieet. I also have 10 paleo-fasting diet menus for sale in the web shop.
• 'Cheat days'. This could be seen as a reverse version of the paleo-fasting diet. With this method, you eat a lot less for 5 days and you eat more consciously two days a week (for example, the weekend). On average you have to make sure that you eat less per week than you need.
• Intermittent fasting. The time-honored method whereby you occasionally miss a meal.

How do you proceed?

With all these methods applies that they are only safe as long as you have to be realistic. After all, if there is no fat left to burn, then at a given moment you burn other tissues like your muscle mass. If you indeed have too much body fat, it is then important to determine how much you eat a week, and how much you want to eat less per week. In this article you can read how you can calculate how many calories you need per day. As you can see, it depends on your weight and fat percentage. Therefore, calculate your caloric need regularly during weight loss, for example every five kilos or every month.

If you lose weight, you have to start eating more and more.

It may be against your feeling, but if you want to lose weight sustainably, you will actually have to start eating more and more, provided that you lose at least. It's like this: if you have a lot of fat you can eat little and get a part of your energy from your own fat reserves. But when you lose weight and lose fat, your body can get less and less energy from your own body. You have to compensate for this by eating more. If you do not, and therefore do not eat much when you are at your target weight, you may get into trouble. Your metabolism can go down or you will digest your own body to get enough energy. Moreover, this is the only effective method to prevent the yo-yo effect.

Keep a diary at

Self I keep track of what I eat every day. That gives me so much insight (and it also helps me in my work to help others). My clients also keep a food diary. Some not every day, but as soon as we run into something, the first thing I ask is to keep the diary again. Because this is all done online I can see everything and adjust immediately. If you want to experiment seriously with less food, I definitely recommend keeping a diary. So you know what you are doing and understand why you have results or not. Moreover, you can gradually start eating more or less.