Quote Originally Posted by gabe
Quote Originally Posted by Reidak
if you find yourself at 4pm having only eaten once, and you aren't getting home until 8, walking past a mcdonalds... you are better off ordering a value meal cheeseburger than skipping eating. 500 dirty cals better than 0 cals.
yea, but like someone else said, alot of fat looking people have muscles too, which means you gotta get lean if you want to show off muscles, which means you should skip the dirty cals if you arent close to being lean, right?
There is a right way and a wrong way to get lean.

When you don't eat, your body will eat some muscle protein for energy. This isn't good, especially since muscle is so hard to gain. This is why starving yourself is such a bad idea for a total 'plan'. A 16 year old girl who eats 600 calories a day isn't doing herself much favours.

To get lean, you should be doing it right. You gradually shed the fat, while maintaining the muscle you worked so hard to build. Here's how..

The body itsself uses energy whether the person is active or not. It is known as the Basal Metabolic Rate ( BMR ) http://walking.about.com/cs/calories/l/blcalcalc.htm

Mine is 2100, meaning that just to maintain my current weight without gaining or losing anything, sitting in a chair all day, i can eat 2100 calories and be the same day after day. I will lose some strength and mass due to inactivinty, but more or less id stay the same.

To lose weight, you just need to shed fat. If i were cutting weight I would figure out ' 2100 + exercise = calories to maintain '. Say i ran 30 minutes and lifted 30 minutes everyday and burned 900 calories doing so. That means i need 3000 calories to maintain weight. I don't want to. A rule of thumb is to eat 500 under maintenance. To lose a pound of fat you need to burn 3100 (im pretty sure) calories. keeping 500 under maintenance per day will lose about a pound of fat a week, without losing muscle; which keeps your metabolism high (metabolism is just your muscle to fat ratio)