Having Weight Loss Through Skipping Meals? Don't!

If we are over-weight and feel a need of weight loss, we tend to do the easiest thing we can think of: skipping one or two meals per day! But actually it is not a good thing to do! Skipping meals will not help a lot in loosing body weight. Why? Because our body is designed to survive!

If we skip meals, our body will think that we are facing some famine conditions that need special handling. To survive such conditions, our body will slow down its metabolism processes in order to conserve energy as much as possible. That means smaller amount of calories would be burnt with the result slower reductions in weight.

So, it is much better not to skip meals. Just make gradual changes into your eating habits into a healthier one to have gradual weight loss. Gradual weight loss is always better than drastic weight loss. Gradual weight loss will promote long term loss of body fat.

Healthy Weight Loss. First Things First.

Don't ever want to have drastic body weight loss or you'll endanger your body health badly. 3-4 pounds weekly is the ideal target if you are obese. Of course you can have more than that weekly but I strongly suggest you to have your physicians supervise your diet program.

Why it is not good to have drastic weight loss? Because, when we loose our body weight, we do not only loose fat but also muscle tissue. The fat loss, according to some studies, is about 75% and the muscle tissue loss is about 25%.

In average normal persons, water dominates about 70% their body weight. Fat tissue contains roughly 50% water while muscle tissue 75%. So, if you reduce your weight drastically, most the loss would be water. If you return to your normal eating pattern, you'll be quickly regain your initial weight. Moreover, loosing that much of water in your body will harm your health very badly as water is very essential for our body.

What are the side effects of having drastic body weight loss? There many, but the main 3 side effects are:

• Gallstone. Loosing too much water will expose you to greater risk of having gallstone or causing "silent" gallstone to become active
• Appearance of loose skin. Loosing weight too quickly will not give your skin enough time to shrink to your leaner body shape.
• Weight rebound. Usually, drastic body-weight loss are the results of artificial changes of meal habit, for example through very-low-calory diet plans. Obviously, we still don't have time to be accustomed to the new meal habit. Soon, we'll be back to our normal meal habit and as the result: return to our initial weight quickly.
  

But please be noted that 3-4 pounds weight loss weekly is only for those who obese. If you are not obese but just want to loose some weight, 1-1.5 pounds weekly is sufficient.

Healthy Weight Loss. How?

So, you have tried to calculate your ideal body weight? Remember, the figures resulted from those formulas are not exact. If your body weight slightly differs from the calculated figures, it's okay, no need to worry.

While some of us have ideal body weight (IBW) or less than IBW, I believe many more who read this blog having over-weight and need to have some weight loss. But, how to have healthy weight loss? Our aim is to have healthier body/life. If we are over-weight, we should reduce our body weight. But, doing weight loss programs carelessly will surely harm our body instead of make it healthier.

The best way to have significant and permanent body weight loss is by following the advice from professional physicians. What I write in this blog is only general guidelines, not specific to anybody's conditions. So, be careful in your weight loss plans.

Next posts will be the guidelines to safe and healthy body weight loss. I hope they will be useful for you. For those of you who want to increase your weight, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until I finish this guidelines to healthy weight loss.

Ideal weight?

Want to know if you have ideal weight or not? There are some formulas for it, but none of them are very accurate. Those formulas are based only on height, and have no method to compensate for age.

Two most popular of those formulas are:

Devine:

men:

IBW (in kg) = 50 + 2.3 kg per inch over 5 feet.

women:

IBW (in kg) = 45.5 + 2.3 kg per inch over 5 feet.

Robinson:

men:

IBW (in kg) = 52 kg + 1.9 kg for each inch over 5 feet.

women:

IBW (in kg) = 49 kg + 1.7 kg for each inch over 5 feet.

Note: IBW = Ideal Body Weight; kg = kilogram

Devine formula will suggest too low IBW for women generally (especially for short women) and Robinson formula performs poorly for tall men. So, the best compromise is to use Devine formula for men and Robinson formula for women.

See you in next post. Still about body weight I think

Too fat? Sleep more to reduce your weight!

Funny, huh? Sleep more to be slimmer! Yes, strange but true. Why? Because, our body burns some calories when we are sleeping. The more we sleep, the more calories burnt. But, of course too much sleep is not good for our health. We need to have the right sleep habit. At least, good sleep habit will help you maintain your ideal weight.

A study conducted by experts from Columbia university found the facts that people who sleep less than 4 hours every night have 73% tendency to overweight. The tendency is 50% for those who sleep 5 hours every night, and 23% for who sleep 6 hours every night.

Why is that? Another research from Obesity Research Center in Columbia and Mailman School of Public Health showed that those who don't sleep at night spend most of their time watching TVs or playing with their PCs. Guess what other things people use to do while watching TV or browsing the internet with their PC? Emptying their refrigerators into their stomach!

The more scientific explanation about this is: the lack of quality sleep makes our body produce too little leptin hormone that plays a key role in regulating energy intake and energy expenditure, including the regulation (decrease) of appetite and (increase) of metabolism. On the other hand, the production of grehlin hormone is increased. This hormone has the key role in regulation (increase) the appetite, that's why hungry people have a lot of grehlin hormone.