Significant Facts About Nutrition.

What is nutrition? According to science nutrition is the process by which the cells in the body obtain what they need to sustain them. The food that you consume is where nutrition comes from. The better the food the more nutritional value it will have.

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An essential fact about nutrition is that our body has "famine mode", and this is a really vital piece of information about nutrition you should know if you're thinking about weight loss. During times when food was scarce, which has been for the greater part of man's evolution, the body built 'famine mode' as a defense method.

Famine mode is really quite easy to understand. If the body isn't receiving enough calories then it begins to amass what calories it does get. To do this the body considerably reduces the metabolic rate (which is the rate your body burns calories while at rest). The body now starts to convert muscle tissue into energy to make up the short fall in calories. Why does it do this? Well muscle is 'costly' to maintain in relation to calories and not as important as the body's fat in times of famine.

Because many weight loss plans limit the number of calories you can consume each day it is vital that you know all about famine mode. This will mean that not only will you reduce your metabolic rate but it will also cause you to lose muscle tissue - the very thing that makes you look good and burn up the calories.

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Of course, in order to lose weight you do have to eat less calories than you burn but in order to do this and not trigger the body's famine mode you need to reduce the calories consumed slowly rather than quickly and massively. You want to have a differential of no more than 500 calories per day between the calories burned and the calories taken in - this is a good ballpark figure.

Making sure that the food you are eating is of good nutrition and eating smaller meals around 3 hourly will lull the body into believing that it is in a time of abundance. The result is that it will quite happily use the calories for energy rather than storing them as fat.

Having resistance training in your exercise regime not only will change your body for the better but is also more help in staying away from famine mode. By adding resistance training e.g. doing weights you then tell the body to send the calories you consume to build muscle tissue rather than fat. The more calories you burn will depend on how much muscle you build.

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