It seems really easy, right? Eat less, Move more, Lose More!
Maybe in the past it worked for you. You ate 1000 calories a day in preparation for what, prom? wedding? Some event where the thought of “looking fat” or *gasp* BEING FAT was societally galling.
But now you’re in your thirties, and maybe it’s not as easy, and the weight doesn’t come off as fast, and you’re hungry, and cranky, and have bad brain fog.
And it leads us to be discouraged, downtrodden, starving… and we think “if I’m not losing weight, then I may as well eat – [whatever we’ve deprived ourselves of the most]”
This is either followed by an abandoning of the diet completely and a regaining of the weight previously lost (or more) or by a stubborn insistence to restrict calories and fat even further — leading to a downshifting of basal energy expenditure. It’s a vicious cycle.
To a large degree, our body weights are regulated by our hormones – hormones that indicate to eat and indicate when we are satiated. Hormones signal our bodies to increase energy expenditure and when calories are restricted, hormones will slow energy expenditure.
Leptin is a hormone that regulates fat stores by inhibiting hunger, ghrelin is a hormone that increase hunger when your stomach is empty, and insulin, which plays a very significant role in hunger, also deals with eating behavior and fat management.
When we try to diet, our bodies, intent on surviving, try to return to their original set point. First your body will slow metabolism to try and slow down weight loss – resulting in slowed weight loss and eventual plateauing.
Think of set point like a ‘body weight thermostat’. With a thermostat, when the air is hot enough, the furnace turns off and when it is too cool, the thermostat turns the furnace on. Regardless what kind of diet a person follows, there will be weight loss effects in the short term, but eventually, even with continued compliance, body weight plateaus and in time, the person begins to regain the weight.
Exercise is similarly thwarted by metabolic compensation.
Studies have shown that people actually end up decreasing their activity outside of the period of exercise or increase their caloric intake in response to exercise. No one is saying it isn’t good for you: regardless of size, improved cardiovascular function, increased strength, lowered stress are all benefits of moving your body. But exercise represents a very small portion of your total daily energy expenditure, unless you are exercising multiple hours in the day. Consider a moderate exercise of 1 hour of moderate walking/ jogging, 3 times per week. Each walk burns approximately 100–200 calories.
But your basal metabolic rate (BMR) – your hormones – have reacted to your dieting over time. BMR isn’t something you can control, either. You cannot ‘decide’ that your heart will pump more blood. You cannot ‘decide’ to generate more body heat. No amount of willpower will make your kidneys use more energy.
Sometimes it slows as much as 10% with each round of caloric restriction or deprivation. Your metabolism after having a baby is also altered, because your body had to supply an entire additional human.
And as you get older and your hormones change, your basal metabolic rate and your body’s needs change. Do you really feel like you’re eating that much more or exercising that much less now than you were before you had babies? No. If anything now, I’m never able to be idle and I’m definitely heavier than I was before kids.
Calories are such an easy, catch-all metric that can easily be commodified and present themselves as an “easy” solution. to a really, REALLY complex problem.
And, despite having been proven in multiple studies to be ineffective (
https://idmprogram.com/evidence-caloric-restriction/
), it makes it an easy, quantifiable measure to slap on packaging and arbitrarily tell you what food is naughty and what food isn’t with little-to-no actual information about its nutritional value and merit for the health of your body.
Reflection for this week:
Visit
and see how many calories it estimates that your body needs to function. Does it seem like a lot? A little? How does it compare to the amount you eat while dieting?