In the society we live in today, we want to do everything as quickly as possible. And weight loss is no exception. But here the rush to lose kilos is often frowned upon, and we usually find the ‘rebound effect’ or the classic warning of muscle loss that can suffer. But the truth is that right now we have quite a bit of evidence that contradicts the suggestions we’ve made internally.
Primary mirage. A fairly repeated caveat at the beginning of a strict diet is that the first kilos lost correspond almost exclusively to water and glycogen, not body fat, which is what interests us. And there is no problem with the science here, since glycogen (which is our immediate energy store) is stored in a deeply hydrated body.
This strange composition explains the rapid and illusory weight loss at the start of a very low-calorie diet. This explains the almost immediate and exaggerated weight regain that occurs when a person eats too many carbohydrates in their daily life again.
rebound effect. This is probably the most widespread dogma when we talk about weight loss, and this idea tells us that if we lose weight and then return to a sedentary lifestyle, we will regain the previous weight and some more. But here is a study of 200 obese people contradicting this idea.
And, to reach this conclusion, the researchers divided them into a group that lost weight quickly over 12 weeks and another group that lost weight slowly over 36 weeks. Once this was done, they waited 144 weeks to verify that both groups regained the same weight, contradicting what was said.
He’s not the only one. In addition to this, there are other studies that confirm this same line, such as one that equated the total weight loss between participants and found that the number of kilos regained in the long term was virtually identical regardless of the speed of the process.
Muscle mass. When losing kilos, the “rule of fourths” is often cited which means that approximately 25% of the weight lost is always muscle mass and fat free. And here is a review of this principle concluding that the actual loss of lean tissue is usually small and that the popularization of this data leads to serious measurement problems.
Postprandial fat accumulation. On a clinical level, there is a concept called “fat overshooting,” which describes how a very aggressive deficit can cause the body to store fat more easily after giving up the diet. And although this phenomenon has a reasonable biological basis, general health articles often make the mistake of generalizing it, since the most consistent evidence in this sense is seen when observing non-obese people who go on a diet, and not so much in patients who had a previous clinical picture of obesity.
It is not risk free. Although we sometimes exaggerate, an express diet that is not well controlled has problems. For example, it has been found that following an extreme diet of 500 kcal per day leads to triple the risk of symptomatic gallbladder disease compared to those following a moderate diet of 1,200 to 1,500 kcal, which is more normal.
This is why it is always advisable to go to experts with specific weight loss training to make a completely personalized plan, beyond trying to diet based on the posts we see on the Internet promising almost miraculous results.
Picture | Andres Ayrton
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