Posts by takapaha

Original Post by kmleela:

I was surprised to read someone's post last night regarding diuretics. One of the responders claims that diuretics actually dehydrate your body, causing you to retain water. Is this true? I have been taking a prescribed diuretic for about 18 months to keep my blood pressure in check, and have at times increased it to off-set eating more sodium. Could the scale be reflecting water retention...water retention caused by a pill that I thought would be ridding me of excess water?

I appreciate all your responses!

Thanks!

Excellent post, Swimfreak!  Very well said!  :)

 

Original Post by swimfreak26:

This 1200 calorie thing has gotten way out of hand around here...let me debunk the myth that has been bugging the hell out of me since I got here.

The myth: "You need 1200 calories per day or your body goes into starvation mode and you won't lose weight."

This is said probably 10,000 times a day here. It's true that your body goes into a "starvation" mode if you're under 1200 per day. It's ALSO true however, that if you're burning 1800 calories per day and eating 1799, your body goes into the same "starvation" mode. 

 Starving your body of EXTERNAL energy is the entire purpose of a diet. When you don't put enough calories into your body, it turns to your fat stores and begins to convert them into usable sources of energy...thus depleting your fat deposits and becoming your primary source of weight loss.

The reason for the 1200 mark is simply that it's been determined at about 1200 calories you can expect to get a balanced diet with the necessary nutrients in sufficient amounts, if you put any effort in at all. Eating 800, 900, or 1000 calories a day can work if you're ensuring that you get all your proper vitamins, essential fatty acids, and essential amino acids (by way of complex proteins). There is just a ton of effort and planning that have to go into making this work, and therefore it's not feasible for an average person...hence, "eat 1200 and you've got a pretty good chance at maintaining a healthy life style, while losing weight (since even the smallest people burn 1500+ in a normal day." 

I should put a disclaimer in that the starving of your body, mainly from carbohydrates and sugars (a real danger if you're eating too few calories) is a bad thing to do because your red blood cells cannot use the ketone bodies (products of fat catabolism) for energy. Yet another complexity to eating less than 1200 a day. With all that said though, it is not the starving of energy that's bad...that IS A DIET...it's the POTENTIAL and LIKELY starving of essential nutrients.