How Little Should You Eat When Dieting?

When we decide to lose weight we can often take a radical approach, no prisoners, no holds barred. We decide that we want to lose all the weight we can, and we want to lose it now. However, is this radical approach the best? While it may be gratifying to be hard core about your dieting, is that what works best in the long run with our bodies and metabolism? Is it better to set a little deficit, or should we go with a moderate one instead? These questions are often brushed aside when we are seized with that initial enthusiasm to lose weight, but considering them early on can have a huge boost on the success rates of our diet. So in today's article we are going to examine these issues closely, asking just how large our caloric deficit should be for maximum long term results, and helping you make the right choice so that your own attempt at a diet benefits from the best possible success rate.

In order for this article to be clear and for everybody to understand where we are coming from, we need to be sure that we are all on the same page. This means that terms must be nailed down, even if they are reduced from their full complexity for simplicity's sake. For example, when we discuss caloric deficit what we mean is reducing your maintenance intake by a certain amount of calories, whether this be through exercise or reducing your dietary intake. Further, when we say that you should reduce your caloric by either a small, medium, or large amount, what we mean is that you should be consuming either 10% less, 25 % less, or anything greater than 25%.

Setting a small deficit is probably the healthiest way to lose weight as it will have the least impact on your metabolism, but it also takes forever and is easy to eat more than you meant to and remove the deficit by accident altogether. A moderate deficit is probably the best way to go, through your metabolism will start to fight you if you do. You can expect to lose some muscle mass, and should eat more protein as a result. Finally an extreme deficit will help you lose the most weight quickly, but your metabolism will go crazy and you will lose a ton of lean body mass as you go.

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