Eating Too Little Can Slow Down Your Metabolism

Eating too few calories for the efficient functioning of your metabolism
ultimately results in more stored fat. This might sound like a contradiction,
but eating a calorically deprived diet over a long period of time actually
causes the body to begin to hang on to the fat supplies it has and even add
to them. Because a steady supply of food was not guaranteed to our
hunter-gatherer forebears, the body developed the added ability to slow
down the metabolism and store extra fat during periods of famine. If we
did not have this ability, we would not have survived the lean times.
This is the primary reason that very low-calorie or starvation diets do not
work in the long run. Almost everyone who has ever been on a calorically
deprived diet knows that at first the pounds just melt off. But eventually you
reach a plateau where you stop losing weight, no matter how hard you try.

That is your body’s natural fat-storing survival mechanism kicking in.
Recent studies have even shown an unexpected link between chronic
caloric deprivation and obesity. Research conducted by Cornell University
and the University of California at Davis have shown the connections
between obesity, hunger, and poverty: poor women who periodically go
without food so that their children can eat are often obese. The more often
you starve yourself to try and lose weight, the slower and less efficient
your metabolism will become.

In 1993 I had a client who was a former heavyweight boxing champion
who would always be 25 to 45 pounds overweight going into our training
camps. Each time we prepared him for a fight, he would be losing the same
weight over and over again. This meant that we would have to prolong the
usual six-week training period to about three months, which often brought
us close to the edge of training burnout. It was a tremendous waste of time
and resources to train a quarter of a year because of a simple weight issue.
On one occasion we had been training hard for two weeks and my
client had not lost a single pound. This was a serious problem because the
fight was only six weeks away. Thinking that low thyroid function might
be the cause of his inability to lose weight, my doctor ordered a thyroid
test, but the test came back normal.

At this time in my career, I had begun reading studies on metabolism. I
consulted with the doctor we were using for this program, and he and I
decided to run a simple metabolic activity test on our client. The test
results showed that his metabolic rate had been slowed by 30 percent. We
discovered the reason was that he wasn’t following the food plan we had
given him to help him lose weight and support the intense physical activity
of his training program. Thinking it would help him to lose weight faster,
he wasn’t eating breakfast and was skimping on lunch. The opposite had
occurred. He was tired in training and his body was hanging on to its fat
supplies because it thought there was a famine going on. In other words
it was slowing down his metabolic rate. At first it was difficult for us to
convince him that he had to eat more to lose weight because it went against
what he perceived as logic. But as soon as he began eating the proper number
of calories and nutrients, he saw the pounds begin to come off.

In his book Turn Up the Heat: Unlock the Fat-Burning Power of Your
Metabolism, nutritionist and champion bodybuilder Philip Goglia points
out that we are a consistently underfed society: “I have found that most of
the people who come to me with weight and health problems are usually
already ingesting far fewer calories than they should in order to efficiently
fuel their bodies. Therefore, their metabolism, the body’s calorie-burning
furnace, is already running 25 percent to 60 percent below its ideal metabolicefficiency
level. In turn, the body is storing much of the limited amounts of
food these individuals eat as fat and wasting muscle tissue as an adaptive
mechanism to create an alternative energy source.”
You have to eat a certain amount of calories per day to lose body fat
and preserve and build lean muscle mass. Eating too few calories can even
cause your body to cannibalize its own lean muscle to get the nutrients
needed for survival.