The Critical Reason You Must Manage Your Calorie Deficit Carefully

by: Ben Kong

Another reason why you need to manage your calorie deficit carefully is the 'starvation response'. Losing a kilo of body fat per week for several weeks may be impossible even if you could sustain the lack of food and training with very little fuel. This is because when the body is pushed too hard with any diet, it will rebel and begin to hold on to every calorie it gets as a primitive survival response. It doesn't care about you getting a six pack, it just thinks that you are in the middle of the desert starving, so it tries to keep itself alive. The result is that fat burning is stopped in its tracks and your body cannibalizes its muscle tissue to feed itself until you decide to be more sensible with your food intake.

An incredible example of this is recounted by Clarence Bass, the legendary bodybuilder who has reduced his body fat to a staggering 2.4% on numerous occasions and has kept himself in the 4-6% range for about 30 years. On one occasion he had to lose a certain amount of fat, which he calculated to be a deficit of 750 calories per day for one week. He was at 3.1% but by the end of the week this highly trained and experienced bodybuilder ended up at 3.7% gaining a almost one pound of fat despite (just) a 750 calorie per day deficit.

This happened again two years later when he again started a week at 2.4% and dieted too hard and over the course of a week ended up losing 5.6 pounds in seven days but having his body fat go UP to 3.1%. This meant that Bass lost 6.12 pounds of muscle and gained 1.06 pounds of fat.

If Clarence Bass, who is one of the most experienced bodybuilders and consistently ripped men on earth can be overdoing it and provoking his starvation response on a 750 calorie per day deficit, then it pays for you to be careful.