Sport Two questions

Sport Fitness
N

neenaw

0
1. say you're 'allowed' 1500 calories per day in order to lose weight. i know the sensible thing to do would be to split the calories into 5 or 6 meals with plenty of vegetables and other low calorie foods. however, say i ate two plates of chips (fries for the americans) every day and nothing else and it equalled 1500 calories. would i still lose weight? i'm just trying to get my head around the significance of the carb/protein/fat ratios and things like that. i mean, i find it hard to believe that to eat such high fatty foods but still have 1500 calories you would lose weight. i'm in no way considering this type of diet (no way!) so don't worry about that. would the downfall simply be that you would be very hungry and under-nourished? the fat would still drop off?

2. we all know that we should drink at least 8 glasses of water a day. what i'm wondering is whether this helps us lose weight due to substituting it for high calorie drinks and therefore decreasing our calorie intake or does it work in a more complicated way? does water itself actually help with weight loss?

thank you! :)
 
#1 -

It would not have the same effect for multiple reasons:
1. Your metabolism wouldn't be as active as though you were eating throughout the day, so you would burn fewer calories (your BMR would drop)

2. The high saturated fat content would increase your LDL cholesterol levels considerably, further dropping your BMR by impeding your bloodflow and overtaxing your heart

3. For the longer periods of time where you're not eating, your body would ration its energy (store it) and lower its energy usage because it is going to what is commonly known as "starvation mode" but more appropriately, it doesn't know when it's going to get its next energy input.

4. There is very little protein in fried, no-skin potatoes, so your body would lack the building blocks to repair your body, build muscle, and thus burn additional calories.

Now alternatively if you were to maintain a standard ratio of negative calories (compared to your rapidly dropping daily caloric burn) yes, you would lose WEIGHT, but like you said - you'd be extremely undernourished and in very, very poor health. Some of that weight loss may come from muscle - as you will be storing a lot of the fat that you're consuming.

#2 -
Water is present in all transport in your body, including fat transport. Muscles require water to burn calories (as without water, glucose can't reach the muscle to be broken down). The body requires massive amounts of water to break body fat down into fatty acids for usable energy.

The active release of water (active diffusion) requires calories, so the act of passing water will help you burn.

Water also detoxifies the body and blood, leaving it free to carry out more productive tasks, giving you more energy, and increasing the efficiency of calorie burn.
 
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thanks for that Fil. very informative reply!i didn't know that about cholesterol!

interesting info about water too. i'm thinking water, or lack of is part of my problem. i just don't drink enough but don't feel thirsty so it's hard. i never drink anything else apart from the occasional orange juice either. basically your saying if there were 2 identical people with identical diets, the one who drank more water would lose fat faster?

another question about water/fluid. i'm assuming that drinking something else eg orange juice or even a low calorie fizzy drink doesn't do the same as water? why not? why does the water content in eg a diet coke not equal the water content in a glass of water?
 
I'm not sure I understand that last question. There is water in coke - but not as much, obviously, as in a glass of water of equal size. Your body can't use fizzy drink or orange juice for active transport, or for any of the things I mentioned above. It can only use water for that - not just because it's a liquid, but because of it's chemical structure. It's one of the basic molecules of life, whereas "Orange Juice" isn't (though the vitamins in it are - but you can get those from other sources as well).
 
basically your saying if there were 2 identical people with identical diets, the one who drank more water would lose fat faster?
Click to expand...
Yup! The amount depends on how much water person A and person B are getting though. If you're drinking hardly any water at all now, your body doesn't have the necessary tools to break down fat.

So if one person was drinking 8 x 8oz glasses of water a day, and another person was drinking 12 x 8oz glasses of water a day - the fat loss between them would be marginal.

If you take a person who's drinking what amounts to 2 glasses of water a day, and another person who's drinking 12 glasses of water a day, person B is going to be burning considerably more calories. Not just because water directly requires calories to process - but also because person A is lacking basic nutrients (H20) required for the highly energetic task of fat liberation.
 
i gotta agree there. water is good for you and necessary in SO many ways. i personally believe that if the public at large simply drank the required amount of water we'd see a lot less physical problems and disease. sodas simply dont deliver what water does.
 
Fil...you done gave some good answers there! :D

It's not just about the quantity of food but the quality of food. Even if I have six smaller meals a day and they keep within my calorie goals but they're from McDonalds, you're still gonna be gainin the fat.

Thirst is a horrible indicator of hydration or whether you need water because by the time you are thirsty...you've hit the first stage of the heat disorders called heat stress.
 
what i meant was: why does it have to be pure water? a fizzy drink contains 89% water. so surely if you drank loads of fizzy drinks you'd get enough water?

same goes with food - some foods have a high percentage of water - lettuce is 96% water and watermelon is 92% water. surely this should count in your intake of water?

i don't understand why "Your body can't use fizzy drink for active transport" when a fizzy drink is mostly water.

if you drank 2.25 litres of coca cola in a day, you would have drank 2 litres of water since coca cola is 89% water. so... why isn't it the same as drinking pure water?
 
Aside from the fact that the majority of that water is going to be used up in the mobilization and digestion of that food, consider this:
 
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