Weight Loss - Fat Cells are Immortal

                                                                                         

When you lose weight, the amount of fat stored in the cells is reduced, but the cells themselves stay there, waiting for more storable fat to come along. They do collapse a little, but there's no escaping the fact that they're still there.

Alas, losing weight won't get rid of fat cells, but gaining weight will actually cause your body to make more. That's because each cell can hold only so much fat. If all the existing fat cells are filled to capacity, your body will simply manufacture new ones to cope with the excess.

Calories out

When you think about expending energy, you probably think about your daily activities, but a full 60 percent of the energy that your body uses is devoted to basic life functions. It takes energy - lots of it - to keep your heart beating, your lungs working, your brain ticking, and especially to keep your temperature at 98.6° F

The process of expending energy for basic body processes alone ­ with no extra physical activities factored in - is called your basal metabolism. The rate at which this energy is expended is your basal metabolic rate (BMR). As a rule, basal metabolism consumes 10 calories for every pound of a woman's body weight and 11 calories per pound for men. A woman who weighs 140 pounds, for example, expends 1,400 calories just to run her body. That's without lifting a finger or walking an inch. A 140-pound man would burn 1,540 calories. It may not be fair, but that's the way it is.

If that woman sat in a chair all day and ate no more nor less than 1,400 calories, she would neither gain nor lose weight. On 1,800 calories, she'd gain weight; on 1,200 calories, she'd lose. Either way, she'd be bored.

The heavier a person is, the greater the need for calories. A 200-pound woman, who might be very overweight, would require 2,000 calories for basal metabolism alone. (A man of the same weight would need 2,200 calories.) This means that weight loss should be easier for a heavier person: just cut back to 1,500 calories and lose a pound a week. Add a little activity, say a half-hour walk at a snail's pace of 2 mph, and the same woman can eat 1,600 calories a day and still lose that pound a week.

Now, a person who is overweight probably eats far in excess of daily needs. Cutting back to 1,500 to 1,600 calories may be easier to say than do, and that half-hour walk would be a challenge. But these are goals worth aiming for.

Speeding up or slowing down your BMR

The greater the proportion of your total body weight that is represented by muscles, the higher your BMR. Muscle cells are eight times more metabolically active than fat cells.

Plain and simple, more muscular people require more calories to run their bodies. How's that for a motivator!

There's another wrinkle in the BMR picture. As we age, our energy needs decrease. On average, it drops 2 percent per decade. Remember, we lose muscle mass as we age. That's one reason why older people need fewer calories. It's also why, if they continue to eat the same amount they always have, people tend to get heavier as they grow older. This is compounded if they also cut back on activity, either because of ill health or a misguided notion that their active days are behind them.

Several fad diets and many "diet aids" claim to be able to speed up metabolism so you bum calories more efficiently. Some of them don't work, and those that do can be hazardous to your health. But there is a perfectly natural, perfectly healthy way to speed up your metabolism. It's by being more active.

Exercise boosts your BMR and keeps it up for as long as 12 hours after you stop sweating.

An hour-long workout at the gym will rev up your BMR for the rest of the day or longer, and all the while you'll be burning calories at a faster rate. Can anything slow your BMR? Yes. Aside from age and inactivity, dieting will do just that. That may sound backward, but the fact is, your body has fairly primitive responses. When you eat less, it interprets the reduced caloric intake as a sign of famine. So, it slows down the BMR to decrease energy needs. This is the scientific explanation behind weight­loss plateaus and the set point.

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