My sister (who lost a lot of weight a couple of years ago before I started my journey) recommend me the best book I ever read on weight loss. It’s called “Fat logic” and written by a psychologist that herself came from an obese family and weighted 150kg.
She struggled with the yo-yo effect, diagnosed hypothyroidism and generally a bigger build and it lead her to accept that she would need to suffer hunger all the time when she’s skinny as that’s her genetics and she decided to live a happy life, eating healthy but how much she wanted.
Until she fell down and injured her knee. Then her meniscus and she basically became immobile. This is when she decided to lose weight and used her academic approach to read through all the studies and truly understand weight loss for the first time. She quickly realised more information out there is bullshit but as it’s widely accepted and gives people a reason to believe being obese isn’t their fault no one (including herself before) really questioned it.
She called these false facts “fat logic” and she uses science and her own experience to debunk them. The book is only available in German so I thought I share one that comes up often here in this thread too:
Losing muscle because of losing fat is a myth and unfortunately a wide spread one. Losing fat has actually NOTHING to do with losing muscle. It’s two separate systems for your body. She gave the example of a cave men. If he’d be unable to go running / hunting because of using his winter fat for energy he’d probably die.
There are only two reasons why your body would reduces muscle mass:
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it thinks you don’t need it anymore - so you suddenly stop being active and using your muscle. For that to happen you would have need to stop exercising, if you never have this is not a problem. It usually happens after 1.5-2 weeks of not using your muscles anymore
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you don’t eat enough protein and the body can’t repair muscle mass. So this one is where the myth started. Because often when people suddenly reduce their calories they don’t take enough of the nutrients they need. BTW overweight people often have these deficits too as they tend to eat a lot of carbs but not enough vitamins. Okay got side tracked so basically you body needs about 0.8g protein for every kg you weight when your inactive and about 1-2g per kg if you’re very active. Your body uses protein to repair muscle mass - for example when you work out and get sore muscles it’s a sign that the work out “damaged” your muscles. Usually your body responses by repairing the damage and building slightly more as it sees that there wasn’t enough muscle for your requirement movements. However if your body doesn’t have the proteins to repair the mass it will disintegrate the “damaged” muscle mass. So basically a work out could lead to less muscle if you don’t eat enough protein. But that is normally only the case if your protein is lower than 45g per day.
She went in to give her personal example. When she became immobile she decided to lose weight quick to release pressure from her body. She did that on a 500 calorie diet for 6 months. Which comes to another myth “eating less than XX calories is bad for you”. But please don’t take this out of context because what you need to do is get the nutrients your body needs and can’t produce itself. Mainly protein, vitamins and some fats. She consulted a special dietician that gave her that mixture and did monthly blood tests to measure any potential deficiencies.
It’s still mind blowing to me. She gave academic examples of 200kg people that lost 130kg in a year basically by eating nothing but their required nutrients (in an hospital environment). As long as your body has enough fat to use as energy you don’t need to eat anything for energy.
I hope you guys found it as interesting as me. It certainly gave me a lot of new perspectives.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/gcmc4q/fat_logic_the_myth_of_losing_muscle_while_youre/
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