Famine Reaction: The Very Reason Why Your Fat is So Stubborn

Do you ever wonder why your hard-to-lose fat keeps going back to you? Do you feel that you gaining weight back as fast as you lose it? Do you feel worse after gaining back that weight? If it so then you experienced Yo-yo diet.

In my previous article, I mentioned a bit about yo-yo diet. Actually there is one more thing that I didn’t mention you in that article and that is the most important factor that affects your diet. It is called famine reaction.

What is Famine Reaction?

Famine reaction is basically a natural reaction of your body when you shift from high calorie intake to very low calorie intake drastically. The reaction caused your metabolism to slow down and try to keep as much energy as possible.

How exactly does this happen?

Your body is smart. Imagine that your body is a highly advanced factory. It takes in every input given, process it, and make the output automatically. Unfortunately, how our body works is beyond our control. You can’t order your heart to beat faster or your body to burn fat and build muscle. So what to do? Understand the factory’s production pattern (how your body works) and manipulate the input (nutrition and body’s activity) to make the output match your liking.

Come back to famine reaction, you know that it happens every time you shift from high calorie diet to low calorie diet. After a while, your body tries to reserve the energy so you can keep living. How does your body do it? It lowers its own metabolism so even the minute amount of calorie can ensure your minimum requirement to keep living. At this time you basically entered survival mode and stop losing fat!

How this is become a nightmare

Let me tell you a story about my friend. Let’s just call him Bob. Bob feels that he is too fat and he knows that it’s better for him to shed some pounds of that annoying fat. Then he starts to not eating any of his favorite foods. The cookies, chocolate, potato chips, coke, and instant noodles, he starts to abandon them. Bob also skip his meal many times or just eating once a day in order to achieve that calorie deficit, believing that he’ll lose huge amount of weight.

And that’s right, he gets that calorie deficit and loses some weight at first but after three weeks after he started his extreme diet, he hit the plateau. He doesn’t lose weight anymore, his health worsens, and he really craves his favorite foods. In the end, he feels that his hard work is not paid evenly. He starts to come back to his old self, befriend with all his favorite junk foods. He eats a lot of them and he gain back his weight fast!

That’s one example of famine reaction. Well, actually a lot of people experienced it and I was also one of them. Famine reaction is just how our body reacts to change. It is just how we programmed and we can’t blame it. Your body is surely smart but it won’t listen to your order. When you reduce your calorie intake intentionally, your body will think that you don’t have enough food around you and then lower its metabolism to keep you alive as long as possible.

The reduced metabolism is sure means you can survive longer by only burning a small amount of calorie. But that also means that you almost can’t burn your fat!

Fat contain a lot of calories which is 3,500 calories every pound of it. That means unless you burn 3,500 calories of fat you can’t lose a pound of it. Moreover, fat is rather difficult for body to burn. It is easier for your body to convert your muscle mass into energy to use. This explained why people who experienced yo-yo diet feel weaker than before they start their diet.

That’s because they lose more muscle mass than fat, but then they gain back their weight mostly as fat. The reason they gain weight back as mostly fat is because when they hit plateau, they feel very deprived of their favorite junk food. So when they giving up on their diet they start eating very large amount of junk foods. Junk foods always lead to fat body, so yo-yo dieter will always earn more fat every time they lose and gain back their weight.

Now you know the reason how yo-yo diet works and the reason why it is bad for your health. The question is now how do you fight it? Like it or not, you need to exercise a bit to lose fat. Without exercise your metabolism will remain low and yo-yo diet process will happen. Exercise will force your body to elevate your metabolism and burn more calories from fat.

Of course you will still lose a bit of muscle mass but you will burn fat much more than muscle mass. That way you’ll reduce the yo-yo diet effect and feel better day after day. But remember, what’s important is not how fast you lose weight but how to ensure that weight you lose is mostly fat and how to keep that ugly fat off of your body. You might also want to read my previous article to help you lose weight faster and to avoid being scammed.

Wish for you all the best.