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is exactly what they don’t want to happen.
Furthermore, when caloric intake is drastically restricted, it’s not just fat that’s burned to maintain blood sugar levels and provide energy; it’s also protein from muscle and bone. Muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat does. When we have less muscle, we burn fewer calories, even at rest.
And this is just the beginning of a sad cycle for many people. It’s impossible to stay on a low-calorie, high-deprivation diet for a long time. We just get too hungry. To feel better, we eventually break down and start eating normally. When this happens, we start packing on the pounds, gaining more weight than we carried before because our metabolisms have slowed. When we get fat again, we freak out, go back on the low-calorie diet, and—you guessed it—inadvertently slow our metabolisms even more. The cycle repeats itself over and over again. And we get fatter and fatter.
We call this cycle yo-yo dieting. You lose weight quickly, gain it back again, and then have to lose it all over again, only to regain again—in spades. Each time you yo-yo, you decrease your metabolic rate and ultimately wind up working against yourself.
The bottom line: Deprivation diets don’t work. Gradual weight loss does. By making the healthy food choices on the three phases of the South Beach Diet, you never starve yourself; you keep your metabolism working efficiently; and you lose weight slowly, steadily, safely, and permanently.
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There’s yet another reason interval training is preferable to conventional training: It prepares you better for living in the real world. Consider this. Do you take your training heart rate when you leave the house in the morning and stay at that level for the whole day? Of course not. You’re constantly speeding up and slowing down as you go about your activities, whether you’re getting up from a desk, running for a bus, or chasing after a toddler. Our lives are actually built around interval activities. Therefore, an ideal fitness program should prepare you for the kinds of physical demands you encounter every day. And interval training does just that.
How Interval Training Works
How does interval training work? It switches your metabolism into high gear and increases your demand for energy (calories) so that you burn more calories and fat. Think of your body as a car. When you drive in stop-and-go traffic, you burn a lot more gas than when cruising along at a constant speed. With gas prices so high these days (let alone our desire to use less fossil fuel), that’s the last thing you want to do when you’re driving. But it’s exactly what you do want to do to burn maximum calories and fat during exercise. And that’s how interval training works. Every time you work hard and then slow down, you waste energy and use up calories. And what it’s costing you are those extra, unwanted pounds.
Debunking Those Exercise Myths
Many of you have heard metabolism mentioned in connection with weight loss, but unfortunately, few people actually understand what metabolism is all about. If you want to look great in your bathing suit, fit back into your “thin” clothes, prevent diabetes, and maintain a healthy weight for life, you need to know how to make your metabolism work for you, not against you. So bear with me while I give you a brief lesson on metabolism.
In a manner similar to how your car runs on gasoline, your cells run on a substance called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is made in all the cells of the body. You need energy from ATP to run your body’s systems as well as to perform your day-to-day work. ATP is, in a sense, your only energy source, and it’s replenished by the food you take in daily, as well as the fuel stored in your body as fat or glycogen (the storage form of sugar). ATP is what’s converted into the energy you need to contract your muscles and perform all of your bodily functions. Using ATP for energy is
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