There are many people who think that the easiest way to a fit body is diet or excessive moderation at the table. Which is fair, in a sense, in the sense that reducing our diet to a few hundred calories makes us lose weight in the short term. Try to eat 500 calories a day, if you don’t pass out, you will lose at least a dry pound or two the first week. This very wrong way of thinking has meant that many people have become accustomed to underestimating physical activity and acting on nutrition to reduce weight.
Today we see what this means in terms of muscle mass, and why losing muscle mass is the misstep that can ruin our metabolism.

Loss of muscle mass from diet: the consequences.

1. Decreased metabolism .
   The metabolism is reduced easily, and the more we go on the less easy it will be to lose weight. On the contrary, we will gain weight: it is a pity that, if it takes a few days to a few weeks to lower the metabolism, it takes months to get up.
   Give him eight to twelve of a normal, sufficient and nutritious diet if we have been on a short diet. A few years of the same if we have been on a diet for years.
2. Skinny fat or fake skinny look.
   Cutting calories or restricting the choice of foods transforms your body, giving it the appearance of “skinny fat” or what in Italian we would call a fake thin, someone who has not lost fat mass but has emptied of muscles.
   The body in food restriction does not burn fat, but tends to sacrifice muscle. I have a friend who is skinny fat, and who reminds me of what I was like a few years ago. The worst is that in order to obtain a body that is not beautiful, but as if drained, one makes many sacrifices.
3. Evolution of the skinny fat look. The more we go on a diet, the worse our skinny fat morphology gets. The areas where we tend to gain weight swell, especially the abdominal area, as we age.
   The older we get, the more the body, with a low metabolism, cannot use the energy we give it, but it is sufficient for survival.
   So digestion becomes complicated, the belly swells, one meal too many turns into body fat, we are weak and not very energetic. The body changes and we have more belly and more loose skin: the legs seem thinner, so do the arms.
4. Health is falling apart.
   The body is indeed a complicated machine. According to many nutritionists, without prejudice to the idea that we shouldn’t eat too much, we shouldn’t eat too little either: our health is at stake, between the stress of continuous restrictions (this hurts me, this makes me fat …) and the processes that the body can no longer afford (keep muscles, keep skin hydrated, keep digestion efficient, and then nail and hair beauty, period, sleep, etc). 

   Result?

   Over time, people who, in order to be in shape, put themselves on a diet and do not contemplate a more active lifestyle become thin but with fat, flabby, not very toned, not very harmonious, they get sick.

   All this could be solved simply by eating as we should, that is for our weight and for our age, but by having a more active life and a little sport to preserve lean mass.
   Our body cares much less about wholemeal food, if we don’t take care of our lean mass.
   Already as we age we tend to lose muscle, and metabolism slows down physiologically. And if we don’t do any activity, we will lose the only engine of metabolism: our muscles.
   A body in good physical shape is a healthy body. A thin body is not always.