Low-calorie diets – detrimental to long-term fat loss?

Protein is the primary building block for muscle. While carbohydrates and fat can provide the energy necessary to create muscle, only dietary protein supplies the body with the actual building materials, in the form of 22 amino acids. To build muscle, therefore, you must consume high-quality protein at regular intervals throughout the day.

And muscle is a primary agent of fat loss. Muscle tissue is the body’s key metabolic engine, and is responsible to a large extent for regulating metabolic rate. In other words, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism, and the greater your ability to burn calories, even at rest.

An extreme example illustrates muscle’s calorie-burning role in the body. We all have certain images from television or the newspapers burned into our minds: those of starving people from famine-stricken countries. These severely malnourished people look nearly skeletal. But they don’t look this way because of a loss of body fat. Rather, their appearance is the result of a severe depletion of muscle. The last thing a body without a constant food source needs is the enhanced ability to burn calories that muscle provides. During times of famine, therefore, the body devises ways to conserve every calorie it can, and one calorie-conservation method is to break down muscle and use it for energy – literally eating it away. In fact, a starving body will often choose to break down muscle for energy before it will raid its fat stores.

In North America, thankfully, most of us have not experienced famine. Our problem is the opposite one – with a constant supply of food, much of it in the form of high-glycemic carbohydrates, obesity has become a serious health problem (not just in the industrialized world, but also in developing countries), one so vast that the World Health Organization has identified it as a serious threat. Ironically, over-fat people often try to lose weight by depriving themselves of calories, on so-called “starvation diets” that mimic famine by subjecting the body to extremely little food in order to lose weight. Instead of losing fat, however, extreme dieters lose muscle – and therefore one of their key allies in fat loss. While they may lose weight in the short term, they don’t lose fat. Extremely low-calorie diets, therefore, are incredibly detrimental to long-term fat loss.

If you’re fortunate enough to live in a land of plenty, where you have access to a constant supply of nutritious food, then consuming adequate amounts of high-quality protein is one of the best things you can do for your health. It’s also one of your best strategies for long-term fat loss

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