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Running on a very low calorie diet?
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I've never taken anything like that myself, but it's supposed to be effective. What worked for me was: calories in + exercise = pounds lost
Oh, meant to add earlier - my aunt contracted dysentry following a trip to India, you deffo don't want to be getting that, now that is rapid weightloss
but anyway, three months of those 600 led me to: 8 mths in hospital with anorexia. my bmi dropping to 14 and 5 years on and my relationship with food is still not normal. honestly - some days, mentally, things are so bad, suicide is a real option of relief.
google 'Ansel Keys Minnesota Starvation Study' and watch what happens to virtually EVERYBODY who pisses around with so few calories. your body will not thank you for it. your brain will not thank you for it and seriously, the people in your life will not thank you for it. both your body and mind change when you subject it to such torture.
there are smarter, kinder, less expensive and jus all round BETTER ways to lose weight with sustainability.
Alli and orlistat are one in the same - orlistat is 120mg, whilst alli is 60mg, so side effects may well be less severe on Alli.
It does work though - it causes fat malabsorption. You have to follow a relatively low fat diet to avoid the side effects - fatty stools, oily discharge, bowel incontinence...
I think it almost works in the same way as aversion therapy. You eat fat, get some nasty side-effects, so learn to avoid fat. Hence weight loss. Assuming, of course, that you don't replace the fat in your diet with something else...
I'd be interested to read reports from dietitians rather than people who think their superior lifestyle affords them to right to judge some one's decision to use this diet.
When I was about 18 I ate cream cakes and pasties for my lunch (usually a hot sausage roll with flaky pastry and two or three cream cakes) I could polish off 6 creme eggs in one evening. I did no exercise and I weighed about 2 stone less than I do now and was probably borderline underweight?
Two yrs ago I was doing 5 training sessions and eating healthily yet the weight didn't shift. I do rationally know that food in/ exercise taken results in a balance of fat which lands on my thighs(or not as the case may be) but my personal experience in life hasn't actually proved this little theory very well.
I also wonder at the way that some posters pounce and dismiss this diet. I hope Beebs doesn't mind me saying that my first advice to her about LL was that a healthy long term diet might result in longer gains. I still think LL and other low cal diets are flawed BUT if they kick start weight loss and make the impossible seem achievable why do so many people begrudge that? Is there a diet punishment rule - you must suffer over a long time (possibly because I've deprived myself, so must you...) ?
If it works great. Most people with weight issues yo yo. Is there evidence to prove low cal diets are more prone to this than other weight loss regimes? If we were talking smoking or alcohol or drugs would be argue that cold turkey was wrong and the addict must experience a slow withdrawal? I think we'd probably agree that a professional and the addict know best what works for them Good luck to the OP - I hope your running is unaffected. I suspect the best advice came from the poster who had done this and run.
therese didn't follow a similar diet. She had anorexia. There is a difference between a self imposed starvation and a controlled one.
This is my whole point
This is just knee jerk reaction.
Is my diet of cream cake and pastry better than the Cambridge?
Which do you think provides more vitamins and nutrients?
The original post asked "Running on a very low calorie diet"
The general consensus was that such a low calorie diet in itself was not adviseable but to run on top of this could lead to more serious problems.
Clearly the OP had doubts about the wisdom of doing something so drastic.
The OP asked a question, we answered it, not because we are judgemental due to our collective superior lifestyles, but simply because we all felt that it was ill-advised. Indeed, the OP was given some very constructive advice which she chose to ignore, having obviously made up her mind before starting the thread.
How do you know that some / all of the people who have answered on this thread are not dieticians? I know that at least one has worked in that field and so is talking from a position of knowledge, rather, than as you just assume, superiority.
I'm sorry.
I do apologise. This thread has obviously got a load of nutritionists posting rather than just Sarah (who is informed and who's view was balanced)
How did you find the low cal diet when you did it and tried to exercise? You're obviously speaking from experience?
FFS the diet people make money off this. Is the idea is to shirk all responsibility and then its all down to the diet providers. In what way is that helpful ? Just get a grip of what you eat - eat less, look at the calories and importantly exercise ! A sedentary lifestyle isn't good and that's what 400 calories would give you.
Eat less, exercise more. Its not rocket science and its free.
This diet is crap.
You've managed to pick 3 things there where the aim is to ELIMINATE them from the body.
I think the fact that it would be a wee bit dangerous to ELIMINATE food from the body makes the series of analogies pointless and emphasises the point that most posters are trying to make. Food is not bad, it is GOOD, in fact it is essential.
I don't disagree about healthy eating habits parkrunfan and cougie. This diet makes the impossible possible and THEN the hard work begins to develop those healthy eating habits. You can do it with a long slow diet but you're basically talking a long period of hunger because you have to create a deficit to lose the weight?
I just think some posters find eating + exercise too black and white. It isn't. I am living proof! I can send you the pics of me as a skinny woman and I did eat what I said.
My observations were prompted by the comments suggesting that exercise always equalled weight loss and food intake always equalled fat. Not in my case.
Anyway I must take my bar of chocolate and glass of wine to bed....
Not had time to read the whole thread, so apologies if this has already been suggested.
You'd be better off seeing a counsellor to get your relationship with food sorted out have a look at www.dietfreedom.co.uk it's a healthy way of eating and offers counselling. Or see your GP for a referral to a counsellor. It's easy to suggest "eat less, do more". Many ppl do struggle and need help with their attitude to food. Doing a quick fix diet won't change your relationship with food.
D
If that comment was aimed at me, then this is the answer:
Last year I was discovered to have hitherto undiagnosed coeliac disease. It was discovered because I had developed anaemia caused by my body's failure to absorb adequate nutrition. The anaemia caused me, amongst other things, to develop osteopaenia, extreme fatigue and difficulty breathing. This is turn placed a strain on my heart so that when running (or trying to) my pace was extremely slow yet my HR was extremely high, regularly around 30bpm faster.
So if I had those problems on a sensible diet, but with malabsorption, then I guess it would be fairly similar to the sort of low calorie diet that the OP is proposing to follow.
My comments were thus based not on my superior lifestyle, but rather, my own experience.
600 cals is 600 cals. they were created of pretty much the same stuff as whats in the C.D. there was as much carbs, veg, protein and fruit and dairy that 600cals would allow.
i didnt start off a diet like that in the middle of anorexia. a diet like that lead to anorexia. i was absolutely perfectly normal, with a normal attitude towards food. yep i wanted to shed a few lbs.
the point i am making is that such a drastic reduction causes changes in the brain that leads to very disordered behavior toward food.
i aint going into the biological/neurotransmitter/hormonal stuff but the body is smart and if you do something stupid like the cambridge diet and run, your body will cop on fast and bite you back in the ass twice as hard.
Actually, there is an abundance of research that demonstrates VLCDs (very low calorie diets) are associated with significant regain, and offer no benefits over a low calorie diet in terms of long-term weight maintenance, costs involved and risk of side-effects.
And so far as the analogy of food and drug/alcohol additction - the difference between food and drugs/alcohol, of course, is that we need food. It isn't optional. Where food is concerned, it isn't about withdrawal, it's about developing a relationship with food that permits you to enjoy it whilst also adequately fueling the body, without going overboard and consuming surplus to requirements.
drastic reduction in both calories and body weight causes leptin in the body to lower. leptins function is to lower the activity of a neurotransmitter called NPY. NPY is a POTENT appetite stimulant (seriously seriously potent - ppl injected with NPY had their appetite increase SIX fold). so when leptin is lowered, NPY levels soar and the appetite becomes UNCONTROLLABLE. leading to refeeding.
as ancel keys' study pointed out, when the body is starved at those levels (and he fed his participants 1000 cals), and bodyweight is dropped drastically - the body will gain weight easily, and quickly due to decreased metabolic rate and hormones which are signaled to cause bodyweight to return to 'pre-diet' weight PLUS ~10% (the 10% is to ensure that there's extra stores in case the famine starts again...!)
Morning
therese no offence was meant so I apologise. Anorexia is a horrid disease
I welcome the comments regardng the research. My whole point was that many posts lacked that. They seemed to be based on personal resentment of a 'quick fix' rather than fact. I don't think I have at any point advocated either the diet or the running on a low cal diet as the answer
I think the above posts have more chance of making the OP consider her plans for future weight control than the 'all fatties eat a lot and don't exercise' viewpoint........ I also think sometimes you have to try something once to find out it's not for you.Yes all the diet companies are making money out of people's misery meanwhile. Personally I'd use Food Focus (website that if you use it properly logs your food intake and exercise) if it's still around
edited because my fingers are not hitting the correct keys!
A couple of years back a C4 documentary took two female journalists and put them on crash diets to lose weight down to a size double zero (UK size 2). One managed it but said she was thinking about food all the time. The other had to be withdrawn from the study as she developed bullimia having never had eating disorders before, caused by the extreme low calorie diets. It was called "Superskinny Me" and someone has uploaded it to YouTube if you want to watch. The diets they were on were restricting calories to only around 500 per day and it basically screwed them up.
Definitely don't run on just 500 calories. Since this is less than half what a sedentary small person needs to function, you don't want to be putting your body through any more stress than it currently is. I'd also be very critical of your GP and CDC (though they are getting paid and do they have any dieticians qualifications?). Running on 500 calories is an absolute no-no.
May i suggest you look up nutracheck, at www.nutracheck.com .It is a website based diet diary deal, that can accurately count your calorie intake, because it has the relevant nutritional info of most foods in it.
For a small monthly fee, this will help you count your calories and fat intake, and log your calorie expenditure.I speak from personal experience, that it works very well indeed.
Take care.
500 cals a day and he wants to run ?
I just cant find the words to describe how bad that will be for your health.
After reading through this thread I see he hasnt replied in a littlr while, I hope he is still alive.
Crazy idea - stop exercising to go on a starvation diet to lose weight.
I would also add resistance training as it has been shown to prevent muscle loss during hard dieting.
There are some sources in this article for this information:
https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/8/3/511/4558114
Except that, go for it. You'll find that it is quite challenging to keep a high pace during a VLC-Diet, mainly because now your body is 85-95% burning fat and 5%-15% burning glucose made from protein. The good part is that you won't be able to get lactic acid build-up, so there's that. Over time I hypothesize that your body will create more and more enzymes needed for energy conversion which should help you keep a higher and higher pace. I never really tested this though.
Anywho, if I remember correctly I could run for about 9 km before hitting a weird wall. I wasn't precisely tired, but I simply had no energy left - and I had to walk the last kilometer home.
Other aspects. I would also add 3-4 grams of fat each morning to trigger your gall bladder - this will completely remove any risk of gall stones associated with this diet. This could, for example, be 3-4 pills of fish oil, the research on the health benefit of fish oil supplement a bit flimsy and it's mostly marketing but w/e, it's not worse than olive oil. However, stay the fk away from coconut oil, that shit is 95% saturated fat and is called poison by professionals. The coconut oil scam should be a prime example of how easily manipulated people are.
Constipation will be a problem after 3-4 weeks. I would prepare for it. I got this once and it sucked because it was 10 pm at night so I had to talk (constipated) to the closest chemist. After that experience, I added a scoop of extremely high fiber content to my shakes and that solved that. I went with a mix of soluble and insoluble fibers, and that worked. I don't think you want only insoluble for example, but I could be wrong.
After the weight loss you'll find that as with any weight loss, slow or fast, it will be hard to keep it all off. This has really nothing to do with how you lost the weight, it's just how it is. Our bodies are designed to store energy for a rainy day or month. You've over a lifetime trained your body to store energy, not for a day or month but for 6 months, your body will continue trying to achieve this goal. This is called the "set point theory". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990627/
People posting about health concerns...What do you possibly think is going to happen? Please have some faith in evolution, our bodies have been designed to withstand a lot.
And to those saying "starvation". It tilts me when people use this word because it implies a binary relationship to events in biology. You're either in "starvation" or you're not. This is not how biology works. Biology is always a gradient response.
Please read the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
It is one of a kind, never again will such an experiment be possible. It is the basis of so much in nutrition. It's almost 1400 pages so I wouldn't call it "light reading".
If you're the person saying these things I strongly suggest you try actually starving yourself. I tried it, it was quite interesting. I ate a pack or two of noodles per day (trash food). I did not get enough protein and my body responded with sending my resting pulse down to 40. I at no time felt sick or unable to go to school. But I remember during an organic chemistry lab I stood up too quickly and I got very lightheaded, this is something that had never happened to me before as my blood pressure is high enough to ensure proper blood supply. Sure the toxic fumes from all the shit we were using probably didn't help, but I think it was mainly the "diet".