Many people believe that if you skip meals or you start cutting back on the amount you eat without replacing them with healthy foods is going to help you lose weight. Well that isn’t quite true. In my psych class in high school, I learned that when a person keeps skipping meals and has a constant empty stomach the body starts storing up fat. It does this because whenever food was hard to get in prehistoric time, the body knew that it would go through periods without eating or getting energy. So whenever the body did receive food it would take the fat and store it so it can have it whenever food would be scarce again. Now, whenever food is not scarce and we decide to skip a meal the body is actually accumulating the fat that it’s getting from the food when we actually decide to eat.
In the article Diet Myth News Flash: Eating Less Does Not Cause Fat Loss, it states that the only thing the body is losing whenever no food is being consumed is muscle. The body is storing the fat which contains energy rather than the muscle. It wants less tissue which causes calories to be burned faster. The article says, “Studies show that up to 70% of the weight lost while eating less comes from burning muscle – not body fat!” Once the body starts consuming more food it still has all of that fat and gains new fat on top of that because it’s making sure it has some fat saved up for the next time the body is not fed.
The smartest thing to do if one is trying to lose weight is exercise and eat healthy portions. Don’t skip meals or go a day without eating because in the end all if will do is store fat and get rid of muscle.
This is definitely an interesting and important article for people to read. Personally, I find it ironic that you learned about this information in a psych class, which is most likely an elective class for high school students, rather than in a health class that would be required of all students. I think information for these kinds of personal health topics should be more widespread knowledge; I feel I am pretty aware of different health topics but I wasn’t aware of the details of this topic. According to this, an overwhelming majority of people with eating disorders are between 12 and 25. Also, “over one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviors such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives.” If we can educate students more on just the proper way to be healthy, such as how to eat and exercise properly and the consequences of eating disorders, these statistics wouldn’t be so overwhelming.