By My answer to this question might surprise you…
I actually don’t count calories, as it does not work effectively for me, yet I’m lean and muscular and improving every day regarding my strength.
How can this be, I hear you asking? I have 2 words for you…
Intermittent fasting.
I know you would have heard of this many times, and I seem to write about it in almost every blog post I can. The reason I do so is because I’ve (and countless other individuals) have had enormous benefits from this alone.
The truth about what caloric restriction does to your metabolism
Calorie reduction forces the body to slow down it’s processes, in order to match the lower caloric rate you are consuming. Once the expenditure drops below intake, you start to regain the weight. It doesn’t seem to matter if you are still sticking to your diet. It’s when you get to that point in caloric restriction that nothing works. The metabolism slows down to next to nothing, and it takes a while to boost it’s recovery, and get back to your normal self. This is evident amongst body building competitors the most, who diet for too long, and sometimes blow out due to the bodies natural process. Don’t get me wrong, these kinds of diets work short term (I’ve used them several times myself), but then after a while, the metabolism starts to fall in response to it.
What intermittent fasting does for your metabolism
If you want to lose weight and keep it off for life, you have to maintain, or enhance your basal metabolic rate. This is what Intermittent does, and will continue to do, even if you only fast 2–3 times per week!
IF triggers a lot of hormonal adaptations that will not even come close to a caloric restricted diet. Insulin completely drops, noradrenalin rises – keeping your metabolism high. Then you have the amazing benefits of Human Growth Hormone in the mix, making it super easy to burn body fat, and gain muscle mass (this is my ultimate favourite benefit of IF).
It’s been proven in studies that when you fast for 4 days consecutively, basal metabolic rate does not drop, it’s increased by 12%. During the fasting period, we burn glycogen stored in the liver. When this is used to it’s full potential, we move onto using body fat. The good news is that we have plenty of that on our bodies that we want to get rid of! Since we have the ample amount of body fat, our metabolism does not drop.
The main difference intermittent fasting has over caloric restriction, is that obesity is a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric imbalance. The beneficial changes that happen during IF are completely prevented by the constant intake of food. It’s the intermittent part of fasting that makes this strategy so effective. The cessation of eating during a window of time (not constantly eating less daily) is the magic formula for eliminating metabolic disease, obesity and other catastrophic diseases.
To summarize this after the facts, is that intermittent fasting is not only an effective long term and sustainable strategy for weight loss, it actually boosts your potential for longevity. I have been through many diets, and none of them have given me results as profound as this one. Whatever your goal is, you boost your bodies metabolic potential just by fasting a couple of days per week. I actually didn’t go into this expecting weight loss, as I just wanted some relief from my IBS and auto immune responses. It not only has proven to have kept the symptoms under control, but I’ve become consistently stronger, leaner and build muscle mass as well.
I do hope you give this a try, and give caloric restriction the flick it needs, back into it’s non essential box of old and ineffective weight loss strategies. Feel free to contact me on these various platforms if you need further assistance. I have plenty of other blog posts on angedim or join me on fb and insta social standpoints. Please feel free to upvote this answer if it has been useful in some way to you.