Post No.: 0856
Furrywisepuppy says:
The relationship between ‘calories in versus calories out’ and ‘weight’ is always valid but it isn’t a straightforward relationship in practice – it becomes more difficult to lose weight the less you weigh because you’ll have a relatively lower metabolism. And vice-versa, hence gaining more weight when you’re already quite large becomes harder as a larger body mass means a higher metabolism. (But this theoretically means that it ought to be easy to fall within the middle, healthy weight, range!)
So the relationship between energy intake and expenditure is dynamic, which may explain the variability in weight loss between different individuals. Someone who increases their energy intake over time may also find that their energy expenditure increases relatively slightly too, due to an increased metabolism (a larger body requires more energy just to function), and vice-versa. Another effect of increasing energy intake and weight gain is that someone may end up becoming less physically active because of the extra effort required to haul their greater mass around or issues of self-consciousness when in a gym. A major increase in energy expenditure over time through exercise may lead to someone consuming more energy because they’ll naturally feel an increased sense of hunger, thus they may not lose weight as fast as hoped.
Your body seeks homeostasis – like constantly attempting to balance energy demands with supply – hence your metabolic rate will slow down as you cut calories. This means the rate of weight loss will slow down or even plateau a couple of weeks or so into your new lower-calorie lifestyle. One therefore needs to gradually consume fewer and fewer calories as the lower-calorie lifestyle progresses, in order to lose more and more weight, until one reaches one’s desired weight. The hormone leptin signals to the brain the level of one’s fat reserves, so leptin levels drop as fat reserves drop, meaning that the feeling of hunger rises as one loses fat. This is part of the process of losing weight – it means you’re on the right path! Over time, your body will learn to adapt to the new lower levels of adiposity and you won’t feel as hungry as before.
Since exercising more leads to feeling hungrier, this can mean putting on weight – however this is usually in the form of muscle mass rather than fat. So don’t be disheartened if you don’t lose weight because you’re most probably losing fat but putting on lean muscle.
Lean muscle mass increases one’s metabolism, thus if one is going on any weight-loss programme, one must try not to lose as much lean muscle mass as fat mass. Lean muscle mass is more dense than fat mass too thus crash-dieting can achieve quick weight-loss results from losing that muscle mass, but this will likely result in rebounding because of one’s decreased metabolism. It’s therefore better to lose weight slowly via changes in diet as well as increases in activity levels to maintain one’s lean muscle mass.
A higher basal metabolic rate (BMR) – for having more muscle mass – will mean that you can consume more calories without putting on weight compared to someone with less muscle mass. So if you enjoy eating lots but don’t wish to get fat – go build up your muscles i.e. go exercise more! Woof!
A problem can emerge once one stops exercising, like retired athletes who carry on eating nearly as much as they did but not exercising as much as they did. Muscle can be displaced with fat, so to speak, especially if one’s diet doesn’t gradually reduce to match one’s decreased activity levels. Exercising to a high intensity gradually gets harder as anyone ages though, but one should never completely retire from being regularly physically active in some way, unless one is completely infirm!
Most people eventually put on weight again after they partake in a weight-loss diet, although about a quarter will keep it off. The more weight you lose in the first place, the more chance you’ll keep at least some of it off in the long-term. There’s far more to health than just one’s weight anyway (e.g. the condition of one’s internal organs like heart, lungs and liver), and exercising regularly is good whatever your weight. Exercise is vital for improving one’s metabolic fitness.
In a typical person, one’s basal metabolism will overall burn the most calories – more than physical exercise can (unless you’re doing ridiculous, perhaps unsustainable, hours and intensities of physical activity every day), the thermic effect of food (consuming protein produces a greater thermic effect compared to carbohydrates or fats) or thermogenisis to keep your body at a constant temperature (so extreme cold or hot environments will make your body work harder).
Although research shows that intermittent fasting (like having an 8-hour eating window and 16-hour fasting window per day) can be an effective way to lose weight – in its extreme form, eating only one large meal per day will train your metabolism to slow down and store those calories in order to make it through the parts of the day when you haven’t eaten for a few hours. One may also overcompensate during that one meal and thus consume more overall than if one had smaller meals spread throughout the day. One may also experience side-effects like dizziness, irritability and feeling less satisfied compared to eating more frequent but smaller meals throughout the day.
Skipping breakfast can make us crave more calorie-dense foods and therefore less healthful choices later (although don’t overeat for breakfast either). Eat more slowly – this gives your stomach more time to understand that it’s full and signal to the brain when it’s full. One will therefore usually eat less if one eats more slowly. Sit down for meals and treat meals as important moments in the day, rather than just moments that get in the way of doing other stuff.
Context is important – deeming something as a snack (e.g. if standing up and eating with your fingers) as opposed to a meal (e.g. sitting down and eating the same thing with knives and forks) affects whether we’ll eat another meal. If we eat something in a snacking context then we’ll likely decide to go for a ‘proper meal’ again soon, compared to if we’ve eaten the same thing in a meal context. It’s as if ‘snacks don’t count’ as intake or as a meal even if large(!) But any calories in are still calories in.
There’s nothing wrong with the occasional furry birthday party feast though because it’s in the context of an infrequent celebration – it’s more about the routine habits and what goes on during the bulk of the days of the year overall.
Coffee, green tea, or possibly just drinking more plain water, might increase your metabolism temporarily. Spicy foods definitely will, although with a small effect. Getting enough sleep plays a vital role in regulating your appetite and metabolism too.
Hypoxic/low-oxygen training, which includes high-altitude training, could counter-intuitively suppress one’s appetite despite the harder workout.
In summary, if you want to increase your basal metabolism then exercise, increase your lean body mass, and don’t crash diet on severe calorie-restricted diets. There are some rare metabolism disorders but please see your doctor instead of self-diagnosing. The human metabolism is pretty stable through at least adolescence to mid-life, thus it isn’t inevitable to put on weight during one’s mid-life. But one thing to note as you age above 30 however is that your metabolism will naturally gradually decrease – so if you don’t slightly (by only a couple of percent per decade) decrease the amount of food you consume as you age then you may gradually find that you’ll put on weight as you age. We naturally lose muscle mass as we age. Resistance or weight-bearing exercises will reduce this rate though.
Somatotyping (endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph body shapes) is considered outdated thinking. People may also have different bone sizes and limb lengths but this won’t make them more or less able to live healthily (unless they have unpreventable medical problems). Hormone balances and metabolisms may differ, but these are largely down to age and what we do and eat or don’t do and eat.
One may think that being obese will actually help one to survive getting hit by a truck for all that shock absorption, but that’s doubtful! One may also think that being obese will help one to survive better if one were suddenly stranded on a desert island where there’s little food, but one’s metabolism will generally be higher the bigger one is. (Large muscular people will therefore feel hungrier faster too because muscles require much energy and protein to sustain.)
Becoming obese has a feedback system – you can technically see yourself gradually becoming more obese month-by-month hence you can adapt your lifestyle to eat less according to those signals i.e. you don’t just become obese overnight! It’s like you can see the water level rising in the bathtub hence you should be able to know when to turn down the faucet. However, we don’t always adapt by adjusting our intake – we often adapt by getting used to our new size and level of intake!
When obese people go on lower-calorie diets, they may think that they’re especially going through a hardship with what and how much they’re now allowed to eat – but they’re only really being asked to eat like how a regular healthy person eats; nothing more and nothing less! It’s arguably akin to those used to living in a mansion being asked to now live in a regular house! Okay, some people may have it easier than others to keep to a healthy condition, depending on their genes and their immediate environment and surrounding culture. Yet obesity is ultimately preventable for virtually all.
There’s a disputed ‘set point’ theory for everybody’s weight, which claims that people, because of their genetics, tend to ultimately rebound back to their usual weight after they, especially rapidly, gain or lose a few pounds. (An alternative theory is ‘settling points’, which states that people’s weights are influenced by a few more factors.)
Yet there are evidently huge numbers of people who’ve gained or lost weight long-term. There’s clear evidence that whole populations have overall become more obese over time despite the gene pool of that population not evolving that much during that period. Food and drink environments have markedly changed over the past 50 years for many though, leading to a corresponding marked change in obesity rates during these very same years.
Our habits may generally become relatively more stubborn to shift when we’re older but it’s far from impossible; although this does highlight how crucial a person’s upbringing is – putting children on the right path from the start so that they won’t need to change much as adults at all (the message of Post No.: 0336!)
The theory does state that one’s ‘set point’ can change very gradually however. And consuming any amount of surplus calories more than you use up per day, every day, will technically lead to weight gain, and vice-versa if you cut calories from your diet. According to one calculation – an extra 100 calories (about a medium banana) per day more than your body expends will result in putting on an extra 10lbs in weight after 12 months.
Woof. The rise in pet obesity rates is also down to their changing diets and how their owners are treating them. An estimated 1 in 3 British pets are overweight due to poor feeding habits and insufficient activity routines. Raising a pet is very similar in many ways to raising a child insofar that it is the main responsibility of the owner or parent… although a child is not a pet for you to wave treats in front of to get them to perform things; nor are either children or pets toys that you can just dump aside when they’re no longer considered fun or cute!
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