fitness coach; Use it up, wear it out

Eating fewer calories than you ought is dangerous because the body needs the energy to work properly. If you want to lose the weight, exercise more Our bodies burn an average of 1400 calories every day, this is called our metabolic rate. Add in a high intensity aerobic class, a gym session, a walk or any type of movement, and we could easily increase our calorie intake by as much as 2000 calories per day, although age and gender do have to be taken into consideration.

Two decades ago diets were all focused on encouraging you to reduce your calories to somewhere between 700 and 1000 while getting physical at the same time. The drastic calorie reduction equalled weight loss, but that mostly came from water and lean muscle tissue. We need water in our bodies to help store our energy, and losing it will create many more problems than it will solve.

The water loss can be replaced, but when we lose lean muscle tissue, which is biologically active tissue that eats calories when we are doing nothing, we can't replace this so easily. It takes time to grow muscle.

Muscle is vital, everyone should be doing some kind of weight- bearing, strength training routine. Not to mention the health benefits such as increased bone density and strengthened joints, ligaments and tendons. We also lose muscle glycogen, which is the water-based store that stays in and around muscles to provide us with energy.

Energy bursts into life every second of the day. It helps your eyes blink, pushes you off the chair, allows you to run and do your everyday chores. You don't feel this happening, but having muscle glycogen stores that are full of energy and not severally depleted through calorie restriction, deprivation (or dieting as it's formally called), is vital for our everyday bodily functions. When we deplete our energy stores of food (in the form of carbohydrates) the water that stores the glycogen is not required.

For every gram of muscle glycogen or energy that we store in our body we require three grams of water. Take away water, energy, muscle glycogen, and you have, in effect, weight loss.

It is worth noting the importance of carbohydrates in our diet. Carbohydrates are broken down and stored in the body as muscle glycogen, which provide the body with energy. Energy to work, rest and play. The long-term damage to your fat cells by dieting is immeasurable. The female fat cell is one smart cookie; it knows that dieting is bad for it, and can prevent it doing all its energy- providing, life- developing chores. Fat is a vital energy nutrient. Reducing our energy output in a day by 100 calories could, at the end of the year, increase our shape, size, and weight by almost 10lbs. Think about that, 10lb of fat going on to our body by next April. Combine that with a slower metabolism from muscle tissue loss, and it's no wonder the fat cell is confused; 100 calories is nothing, but if we don't "move it" we are certainly going to "wear it".

If we decide to increase our energy output by 100 calories, it is possible to decrease our waistline, and of course, seriously challenge ourselves to "stop dieting". Most of us tend to imagine in the short term that they will be thinner, instead of looking further down the long, windy road.

Visualise yourself getting up every week and being slightly thinner. For instance, did you walk to the shops for this paper? Why not? If it's within reasonable walking distance, try doing this next Sunday. Now the clocks have gone forward, we must move forward with them. A summer of movement will decrease your waistline. I know it sounds simple, but there it is.

Proper energy input will aid the growth and repair of the body in so many ways. This will decrease the chances of "wearing" what we eat, increase our energy levels and set us on a path that may, at the end of the day, have us all looking in the mirror and seeing someone who is content within themselves. The weight loss manufacturers who invented a fad that has now spiralled into a multi-million pound scam, couldn't have envisaged the years of dieting abuse that traps people today.

After years of slowing down our metabolism by decreasing calories to supposedly lose weight, we have inadvertently slowed down our body's ability to function properly. Let's be confident enough to enjoy food and know that it's fine to eat fat, to drink alcohol and to eat chocolate. Let's create more energy which will allow us to grow, play, exercise and live, a healthier "diet free" lifestyleu You can email David with any fitness/health concerns to: [email protected] Good Girls Do Swallow By Rachael Oakes Ashe From: Mainstream Publishing Price: (pounds) 7.99 Rating: 4/5 Despite a rather dodgy title, this is a darkly comic well-written, brutally honest insight into the experience of weight loss, eating disorders and abuse. It is described as the "true story of how one woman stopped hating her body". So if your weight has ever yo-yo-ed and left you feeling depressed, then this is required reading. This book should also be compulsory for all teenagers.

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