You can lose weight by just eating less, but no, it is not healthy in the slightest. Muscle depletes significantly faster than fat when you are simply restricting calories with no focus on nutrition or exercise. So most of what you lose will be muscle weight, which will leave you feeling physically weak (because you will be), frail, and generally unwell. Your hair can fall out, the skin will sag and lose its volume, etc. I’ve noticed a trend, especially in people who have a lot of weight to lose (I myself was one of them!) and its always to JUMP RIGHT IN and lose as much weight as possible RIGHT NOW. Because anything is better than being fat, right? Wrong. All of those things I referenced up above, I went through. It killed my motivation. I felt like crap and started to think… maybe I was better off fat! In the end, I had to change the way I ate and I started to feel better almost immediately. Because of how good I felt, it was easy to continue eating healthy.
It’s just that you don’t know until you know! Once I started to regain some energy with proper diet, I found some active hobbies that I enjoy (hiking, martial arts) and my life has changed, all around, for the better. If you focus on only one aspect of your health, you will always end up disappointed with the results. Same goes for if you focused heavily on fitness but ignored nutrition. Or ate exceptionally well but did not get any exercise. While you may get some initial results, you simply won’t be allowing yourself to feel the best that you can feel. And feeling your absolute best. well, I think that’s a change worth giving yourself.
The simple answer is; In the long term, No. You will deprive your body and brain of the energy it needs and starve it of vital nutrients from food. It is therefore not sustainable or healthy.
I feel weight management should be done through a proper diet. Not to ‘go on a diet’ or restricting food intake, which just makes us miserable, but diet in the truest sense of the word, as in what we eat consistently.
Calories in vs. Calories out is a myth and have its foundations in very outdated thinking and actually not really much science. Whilst it is true that it can be used as a basic measure i.e. you must have X number of calories to produce enough energy to live and expend Y number of calories, it is a massively over the simplified model. Not least of all, that if taken literally from a weight loss point of view, does not work long term. It ultimately has a negative impact on the body and our physiology, but more than that, it is just not sustainable and calorie restricted ‘diets’ have a very high long term failure rate.
A calorie is not just a calorie. In other words, it’s the composition of that calorie that matters. If we take in a specific number of calories which are largely made up of simple sugars or refined carbohydrates, it will have a VERY different impact and effect on the body than if those calories were made up of the other types of macro-nutrients such as proteins or fats.
I would recommend from personal experience to get the quickest gains, and as a long term solution, cutting out sugars and switching to using fats as a fuel source. You will go through a couple of days where the body switches to becoming fat adapted where you might not feel so great, you will in a much better position from a health point of view and provided you are consuming good quality fats, you will not gain weight and in fact, lose it. This isn’t short term and the modern thinking about cholesterol is changing as well and fat does not have a negative impact on the body and heart, for example, we believed it did. Clearly, you can’t eat saturated poor quality meats all day and get away with it, but as a general rule, stands true.
All that means you can and should still eat properly without restricting yourself. Using fats in your food in place of sugar will actually give you a much longer, progressive hunger pattern and be far more satisfying and filling.
Starving yourself in order to lose weight might work in the short term, but it eventually conditions your thyroid to adjust for the lower caloric intake.
The result?
You actually slow down your metabolism every time you starve yourself, which is the opposite of what you want to do if you want to lose weight.
