If you count my week in Paris, which I should since I'm using my peak starting weight as right before the trip, then I've been following my new eating habits for 6 weeks.
How losing weight works is you have to burn more calories than you eat. For the average person, to maintain their weight, the US recommends 2,000 calories a day. How I got to eat like this was eating probably in excess of 3,000 calories a day, for a long time. The thing is, your body won't burn the same number of calories forever.
So one of the theories for successful long term weight loss is that, say you're now eating 1500 calories a day, you don't want your body to adjust to burning 1500 a day. So the theory goes that every so often it's beneficial to eat more calories, to trick your body into burning at that higher rate.
So for the Super Bowl, I decided to not go as overboard as I did last year (pizza, 2 pounds of wings, 2 pounds of lil smokies, nachoes, chips and dip) and this year I prepared 1 pound of smokies and nachoes. I also had a big batch of homemade pancakes for breakfast.
My reaction to the food--of course it all tasted good. But both the pancakes and the Super Bowl food made me feel overly full. Like a heavy weight in my stomach. And it wasn't a good feeling. It was interesting that a breakfast like that wouldn't have felt as heavy just 2 months ago.
What about my body? Did it speed up my metabolism? Did the effect at least cancel out the calories that I ate? Preliminary results showed that no, it didn't do anything besides adding a lot more calories than I was used to burning, adding more weight back on.
It makes sense that our bodies don't respond that quickly, and are likely to continue burning say 1500 calories a day, even if you eat 3000 on Sunday. The moral is that I feel even more motivated to not eat junk. I feel a lot better when I don't.
No comments:
Post a Comment