Can an overweight person starve?
Yes. Starvation isn't neccessarily a wasting away to nothing. Lack of
food causes all sorts of problems. Drop in blood sugar, loss of
electrolytes (that help to maintain your heart), and loss of water
leading to dehydration. An overweight person can starve, but it's
unlikely to happen. It can take weeks if they limit their physical
activity, drink plenty of water and are otherwise healthy at the
outset. Diabetes, heart disease or other chronic problems will make
the lack of food-- starvation-- lethal.
What are the effects of a 300 daily calorie intake for a person
significantly overweight, if they exersize about 1 hour daily?
Standing/resting commonly burns 9 calories / day / lb. of weight. If
you are 200 lbs. your metabolism should need 1800 calories a day of a
balanced diet to keep you 200 lbs. If you eat an excess or imbalance
of protein, fat or carbohyrodrates, all three can turn into fat even
if you keep under this weight maintenance calorie count.
If you don't take in enough calories, your body will convert your fat
to make up the difference. If you trim 3500 calories off your diet,
that will equal 1 lb. of fat. Shaving off 500 per day will equal 1 lb.
per week.
Most severe diets recommend 800-1200 KCal per day. 300 is too low. For
example: a 3 oz. of broiled chicken is 150 calories. No matter how
much balance your work toward, you can't balance a diet with a
300/KCal/day cap.
One problem with such a severely low calorie count is that you will
trigger a starvation reflex in your metabolism. Between that and the
fatigue that would come from the lack of carbohydrates (that convert
into needed blood sugar), you wouldn't lose as much weight as would be
possible if you had enough enough calories to manage regular exercise.
The best diet plan you could follow is a low calorie version of the
diabetic diet. The guidelines include rules for how to omit a cross
section of foods to take in fewer calories than they suggestion for
the base line diet. The diabetic diet is designed to stablize your
blood sugar. Stable blood sugar is key to managing a lot of exercise.
Just as they say "you have to spend money to make money" you have to
eat to lose weight.
This is a decent quick guide to calorie burns:
http://kirtland.cc.mi.us/~balbachl/calorie.htm
This is one source of information on the diabetic diet:
http://www.diabetic-diet-and-recipes.com/index.php3 |
