Metabolic Damage: Starvation & Excessive Exercise

Do you suffer from Metabolic Damage ?

When you are eager to lose weight, you often make irrational decisions like starving yourself and working out for hours. Although you may think that it would help speed up the weight loss process, performing extreme exercises without enough nutrition can do more harm than good.

Most dieters tend to cut their food intake when in a rush to meet their weight loss goal. Then they would spend long hours on the gym anticipating that they would burn more calories and fats. True enough, they would experience fat loss at the first few weeks, but it only happens temporarily.

Weeks after, the oxidation of fat will begin to slow down and then ultimately becomes stalled. In return, the dieter again, limits their intake of fats and carbs. At first, it will restart the fat loss process almost similar to the amount of fat being burned during the first week of workout. However, after few weeks, the metabolism may slow down until it finally stops. Thus, metabolic damage occurs.

Because the dieter is eating less, they can no longer omit a portion of food on their diet. So, they add another hour to their workout. Unfortunately, because of low energy levels, the body cannot burn more calories and fat ultimately leading to metabolic shut down.

What is Metabolic shut down?

Metabolic shut down is the result of prolonged low-calorie dieting and excessive exercise in order to lose weight. It happens because the body needs to adapt with the sudden restriction of calories to maintain homeostasis or the steady state inside the body. To make it simple, it is the body’s normal response to survive with the changes happening when a person tries to lose weight.

This concept is what most dieters fail to understand. When on a low calorie diet you not only lose weight your energy level also becomes depleted, as a response the body stops fat loss by lowering your thyroid levels and decreasing nervous system output. This process is being done in order for the body to maintain homeostasis.

So, when you lower your intake of food and increase your hours of exercise, the cycle happens again. However, the thyroid levels and nervous system output does not increase even when fat loss is stopped. It continuously diminishes and when it becomes extremely low, your testosterone levels also decrease while your cortisol level becomes elevated. This causes muscle loss, which leads to an extreme metabolic slowdown.

Long Term Effect of Metabolic shut down

The body cannot survive on a low-calorie diet for long, eventually it will demand more calories for energy  and when it happens, the dieter will start craving for food to satisfy the needs of the body. But, since the body is already suffering from metabolic damage, it becomes incapable of handling huge amount of calories, which leads to more calories stored than calories burned. And that explains why people with metabolic damage do not achieve a slim figure no matter how hard they try to lose weight.