Large or Small Caloric Deficits When Dieting?

If you are like most people who are overweight you wouldn't mind dropping a few pounds. Say you decide to set out on a diet, intent on getting back to your old college weight and trying to increase your health and vitality. First off, good for you! Second, how do you go about that? Do you just start exercising, or do you simply eat differently, and if so, what should you be eating? We're all tempted to try and lose as many pounds as quickly as possible, but is this the best approach? Should we set a small, moderate, or large caloric deficit when it comes to our diet? Is one intrinsically better than the other, better suited to human physiology? What is the best approach to losing weight on a serious diet? In today's article we are going to take a closer look at these issues, and seek to guide you straight in what can often seem to be a maze of options and attractive distractions.

In order to make this article clear and helpful we are going to establish some basics so that we all know what the terms mean and where we are coming from. First off, when we discuss caloric deficits we must know that this means the amount of calories that is less than what your maintenance needs are. You can set this deficit through either exercise or reducing how much you eat, and while these are very different, for this article we are going to assume they are the same for simplicity's sake. Further, when we say small, medium, or large deficits, we mean that you are reducing your caloric intake by either ten percent, a quarter, or anything more than a quarter. Clear?

Setting a small deficit will result in gradual weight loss, of about a pound a week for men and half a pound for women. The deficit is small enough however that you can easily eat more than you thought and kill it, while the weight loss also takes forever. A moderate deficit is probably the best all round, but your body will begin to fight back by slowing down your metabolism. An extreme deficit will achieve intense weight loss in record time, but your metabolism will go haywire as it thinks you are starving and it becomes very hard to only lose fat as your body will cannibalize muscle too.

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