Adrienne Smith wrote:

>That's a little depressing -- one moves Heaven and earth to shed fat only
>to end up with a slower metabolism!  Any thoughts on whether the slowing
>down is permanent?
>
>

As long as you keep the weight off, you burn fewer calories moving
yourself around and keeping your body temp up, etc.  That's permanent.
On the other hand, with less weight you have more options for an active
lifestyle, precisely because it's easier to get around, and that
increases your energy demand.  Just remember that *every* formula for
calculating your basal metabolic rate has your body weight as one
parameter.  But this is a primary reason why we attempt to add muscle,
because muscle is more metabolically active than fatty tissue.  But
people who lose *lots* of fat will *not* completely compensate by adding
muscle.  In fact, some muscle loss is almost inevitable.  For example, a
person who is very overweight may well have very large muscular calf
muscles.  They are needed to move that person around.  As that person
loses fat, he/she will almost certainly lose some of that unneeded
muscle--unless one does specific exercises to retain it.  And plenty of
people don't want huge calves on an otherwise slender body.

>Also, I weighed my goal weight (actually, a few pounds less than my goal)
>for many years while eating and drinking (vodka) way too much.  Is it the
>youth associated hormones which would have been higher then that could have
>allowed me to be such a pig yet remain very slim?
>
>
As I mentioned in another post, this is one way that some models stay
slim.  They drink a lot of alcohol (spirits, not beer or wine), and eat
fatty food.  This tends to keep them in fat-burning mode and makes it
hard to gain weight.  We all know what a beer belly looks like (If you
don't I can mail photos!), but who ever heard of a vodka belly?

Todd Moody
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