The Numbers

Photo: Auschwitz.org


On Saturday, I read a couple of blog posts that really disturbed me. If you recognize yourself in this post, I'm responding on my own blog since you asked that no one question your feelings on your blog.

The first blogger wrote a post to tell her readers that she was thinking about going down to 600 calories a day since she was planning to go off a medication and had heard that she might gain weight by doing so.

Let's be clear on something: 600 calories is starvation--nothing more and nothing less. You will not be nourishing yourself properly. Your body will start cannibalizing itself in search of nutrition. Your metabolism will slow to a snail's pace to keep yourself going. You will gain back the weight you lose in a snap as soon as you revert to normal eating. This is yo-yo dieting at its worst. It is a perfect recipe for failure. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, people were worked and starved to death. Great diet.

Which leads me to blogger number 2 who wailed most loudly when a trainer told her that she was consuming too few calories and that her large weight loss of the preceding week was only half fat loss with the other half being muscle loss. This again is an example of the body cannibalizing itself in search of nutrition. (See here for further explanations).

Blogger number 2 said something else that made me jump through the ceiling: she wouldn't be happy as a size 6 if the number on the scale was too high for her liking. OK, OK, I know she was being slightly facetious, but let's be clear: in the great scheme of things, it's the measurements that count. The number on the scale can tell a lie, the tape measure always tells the truth. With a healthy diet (not diet in the sense of "weight loss" but in the sense of "what you eat") and exercise, your body will be much healthier than if you simply cut calories. You can be fat and underweight. When you lose inches, you've lost fat. When you lose weight--well, half the time, who the heck knows what you've lost. When I was hyperthyroid, I looked very slim. Trouble was, it was muscle, not fat, that I lost.

But hey, if you want to live and die by the scale, be my guest. Personally, I think I'll be looking at some other numbers too.