Does starvation and skipping meals aids in weight loss?

The Short answer is No, actually, it will stall your weight loss journey and affect your bones making you prone to injury.

Effects on Weightloss

After realizing that you need to shed some weight, what’s the first thing that people do? Find a crazy diet, hit the gym for hours, run obsessively, or turning to various fad diets, or cutting off junk foods and wheat from our diets. And for most people, if they don’t see the result quickly, considering we live in an instant gratification world, they quit and think maybe am eating too much and what do you do next? skip meals. They can decide, maybe I need to skip lunch for this to work and before you know it, you are skipping both breakfast and lunch and just snack here and there during the day and the body can not get all the necessary nutrients by snacks only, secondly, once you have that big meal, in the evening, the body will want to preserve that meal for longer hence converting it to fat.

When you starve yourself, your body will go into “starvation mode” and hold on to fat.  Starvation mode is a protection mode that your body enters when you reduce your caloric intake significantly. If you stop eating or don’t eat enough, your body will do everything it can to preserve energy for it to survive,  including holding on to the weight you’re trying to lose which means your metabolism will slow down hindering your efforts to lose weight. It’s important that you carefully regulate the number of calories you consume instead of just drastically cutting back in an attempt to lose weight.

Chances are when you go back to your normal eating habits; you might gain more weight because of how affected your metabolism has been affected.

Effects on Bones and other organs

Starvation makes people lose a lot of lean muscle mass and lean body mass because the body is eating itself in order to survive, which includes water, bones, and organs. Diminishing the mass of your bones is dangerous, as that diminishes bone thickness and can make you more prone to injury.

Bottom-line – Starvation diets have several effects on the body. Starving to lose weight reduces your metabolism, reduces lean muscle, reduces bone density, and decreases strength – all of these are things that you wouldn’t want in your body.

You can reduce your caloric intake hence lose weight without starving yourself.

How can you reduce your caloric intake gradually?  PORTION CONTROL

• • Use smaller plates – using large plates can make food appear smaller — often leading to overeating.
  • Drinking a glass of water up to 30 minutes before a meal will naturally help in controlling your portion.  Filling up on water will make you feel less hungry.  Being well hydrated also helps you distinguish between hunger and thirst and sometimes, you might not be hungry, you’re just bored.
  • Don’t be in a hurry to finish your food. Eating quickly makes you less aware of getting full — and therefore increases your likelihood of overeating.
  • Use your plate as a portion control guide:
    Vegetables or salad: Half a plate
    High-quality protein: Quarter of a plate — this includes meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, beans e.t.c
    Rich carbs: Quarter of a plate — brown rice, sweet potatoes, whole-wheat pasta, butternut, pumpkin, potatoes e.t.c
    Healthy fat foods: Half a tablespoon  — including cheese, oils, avocado, nuts
  • Use your hand as serving size
    High-protein foods: A palm-sized serving for women and two palm-sized portions for men
    Vegetables and salads: A fist-sized portion for women and two fist-sized portions for men
     Rich carb foods: One cupped-hand portion for women and two for men
    Healthy fat foods: One thumb-sized portion for women and two for men
  • Meal planning – plan your weekly meals so that you don’t result in quick fixes which may lead you into eating in a caloric surplus which will result in you eating more calories than you need.
  • Talk to a professional to guide you through what to eat and how to eat it, according to your goals.