How Your Metabolism slows down when you try to lose weight
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
There are a lot of people out there that have never dealt with trying to lose a lot of weight who think it's all just as simple as "calories in and calories out", "it's the first law of thermodynamics, man!"
It's like saying that running a marathon is easy, just keep running and don't stop!
It is so much more complex and there are a lot of factors and more variation between people than many realize. Obesity is a true epidemic and over simplifying the problem is not helping us solve it.
No amount of mocking "the first law of thermodynamics, man" makes it not true. For everyone complaining about the complexity of losing weight, the gym bros just keep weighing out their chicken and broccoli to great result.
Calories in: What kind of calories? When you eat them, how fast you cut them, how your body reacts to the restriction, how your gut biome reacts, how your brain and willpower reacts, how your family and friends react....
Calories out: what is your actual resting burn, how does that change as you adjust calories in, how does it change as you adjust the type of calories in, how does your resting burn react long term to weight loss....
It's as simple as calories in, calories out, just like the theory of relativity is as simple as e=mc2.
No amount of saying "it's complicated" makes it actually more complicated than just cutting another 500 cals from your meal plan.
In contrast, I have a skinny brother that just doesn't "really feel hungry that often" and drinks multiple tall glasses of grape juice every day and eats ice cream every night.
Take ice cream for example. It needs to be over-sweetened so that when you eat it, and the cold dulls your senses, it still tastes sweet. Most people find melted ice cream to be sickly sweet. But we have tricked our taste buds into eating a lot of it due to the cold. Same thing happens with lots of sweet foods that are offset with sour or salty flavors.
When people say calories in and calories out, calories in is meant to represent calories consumed as food, and calories out is meant to represent calories lost through physical efforts (exercise, and basic daily activity).
The problem, however, is that both sides of it are incomplete. There are parts of calories in that will never get absorbed by the body. If the same person consume the same amount of calories in donuts, or alternatively in lettuce, they will almost certainly gain more weight eating donuts than lettuce even if their “calories out” is the same, because a lot of the calories in the lettuce will never be absorbed by their body and will simply exit as fiber in the first place.
Then even looking at the calories out side, a lot of digestion isn’t even done by our bodies. It’s done by stuff like gut bacteria. Someone who has a healthier gut biome will likely not gain as much weight eating exactly the same foods and exercising exactly the same amount as someone who doesn’t have as healthy a gut biome.
Then there are dieting patterns. Most extreme diets, for example, drive the body to enter starvation mode and lower its BMR, so even two people doing the same amount of exercise and eating the same foods, if one of them does it in a way that makes their body think they’re starving and the other does it in a way that does not, the latter will lose more weight since their BMR will be higher.
Calories in and calories out is supposed to convey the idea that all that matters are the calories you’re eating, and the exercise you’re doing. But this is wrong because the nutritional value of the calories you’re consuming, the timing and frequency with which you’re eating, your gut health, your BMR etc are all also extremely, arguably more, important factors in weight loss.
And all of that is without even considering the impacts of certain types of foods and exercise on your mental health and satiety.
Calories in vs calories out is only accurate in the most basic and meaningless physics sense in the context of weight loss. And yet most people telling others to lose weight offer it as prescriptive advice.
Like I said before, running a marathon is simple, just run and don't stop running until you finish it. So why don't more people run a marathon?
So whole nutrition is important it’s simply a moot point for obese people.
That's accounted for in the "calorie in". Only the useable calories matter.
A "Lapalissade". Saying an issue is more complex than its synthesis doesn't make the issue more understandable.
You won't deny we never seen any person in a labor camp or lost on a desert island coming back obese, no matter their genetics.
So yes, everyone is different and for some it is less easy than for others. But obese people should stop trying to make it sound like their body is going against the laws of thermodynamics...
If they did that we could stop arguing about CICO and all this thermodynamics crap. Going against those is a losing battle. Just focus on your inability to stop eating and you’ll get way more supporters.
It’s an enormous divide between those two categories, and we have about a thousand behavioral contributors — mant of them social and difficult to escape —- that plainly play a bigger role than biological variation.
If you can’t manage to lose those last 20 pounds, it might be some underlying metabolism or gut difference. If it’s 59 or 100 pounds, then there’s almost certainly something else at play and an honest diet and activity survey are very likely to raise concerns.
And the variation can amount to quite a bit. All it takes is time. An excess 100 calories a day adds up to 10 excess lbs in a year. 5 years down the road and you are 50 lbs overweight.
Moreover : so how ex-obeses who became more "average" do ? A genes therapy? And I am not referring to people who had some surgery but those who could lose tens of kgs.
From another angle : so obese people weighting 200 kg also eat like anyone else, but just have a very inefficient metabolism? NO.
And yes, you can become overweight eating the same thing as someone else simply by having a more efficient metabolism. Unless you believe that there is absolutely no variation between humans, which would be ridiculous. All it takes is a 1% difference in BMR to amount to 25 excess pounds over a year's time all else being equal.
As someone who has lost a lot of weight and gotten very strong, and coached a significant number people in their efforts: calorie tracking works… you need to be truthful in your effort.
The micro- level issues or margins of error in CICO are irrelevant to the macro- margins required by someone who has to reduce body fat by 50 lbs, or 100 lbs, or more. If you always record something wrong, and aren’t losing the weight, you’ll still need to make an adjustment to what you’re eating to accomplish the weight loss. There’s nothing magical about 2500 calories eaten or recorded, but there is something definite about losing 5 lbs over a period of time. That’s the baseline metric. The CICO is just an adjustable control.
As an example: most people aren’t willing to cook 90% of their meals for a couple of years. Restaurants generally won’t feed you reasonable portions (or proper vegetables), which is fatal to the cause when you need to lose a significant amount of weight. Routing around those baseline truths isn’t an accurate response to the challenges. Most fit people in the gym… the ones who are there at 6am, aren’t eating out — or calorically freely —all the time either.
The problem isn’t really the science of fat loss, but the world of crappy food products and restaurant meals. Restaurants do not follow a sustenance model.
As for the micro level issues, I agree they don't really matter in the scheme of tracking everything and losing weight, but where they do come into play is comparisons. If my body burns "just" 100 calories fewer per day than someone else, that person and I can follow the exact same diet and exercise and all else being equal, I will gain 12 lbs per year while they maintain their weight.
And I have heard so many people brush off these small variations among people as insignificant. But 50 or 100 calories a day is actually very significant.
Take steps to reduce not only amount of insulin presence in blood stream, but reduce its sustained presence. Reduce visceral fat.
The problem is solved by mix of correct nutrition, moderate physical lifestyle and intermittent fasting. Never by “dieting” or sustained calorific deficit.
Fasting should not be primarily thought of as reducing calories. Rather as creating longer gap inside body without insulin running though blood stream and toggling body to use fat as metabolism source. Weight loss (from fat reduction, not muscle) is secondary benefit.
1200-1500 calories is a very reasonable daily restriction.
- eat more than your BMR (basal metabolic rate) but less than your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) in order to maintain your BMR as you lose weight
- the gap between BMR and TDEE can be increased with exercise
- cardio burns calories but weight/resistance training helps build/maintain muscle mass as one's body drops weight, hopefully more from fats
- every week or so, resetting one's system by eating a very high calorie or carb heavy meal helps jolt the system as well as one's mindset. I personally find it easy to stick to good eating habits if I eat like shit once a week (on purpose, rather than accident).
Am I wrong here?
After reading the reviews of the drug, I decided to just do calorie counting of everything entering my mouth. Down 20 pounds so far in a month or so...
Surrounding daily life with sugar, carbs is the root.
The "Biggest Loser" study found that many of the people who lost weight on the show had a BMR much lower than other people of similar characteristics, but who had always been that size.
In other words, many times, the smug skinny person saying it's as simple as "calories in / calories out" doesn't realize that the people they are preaching to have to eat fewer calories and/or workout more than the lifelong skinny person has ever had to just to maintain a similar weight. Simply because at some point in their life, even 5-10 years prior, they were once overweight.
To make matters worse, how much you burn during exercise goes down substantially as well.
But in the end, the only thing I found for myself to work is to always track my weight and what I eat. So I’m always in control basically, no matter if my BMR is average or lower (or higher). And that’s all that counts at the end of the day.