So I’m reading a book called “The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Dieting, & Exercise”
Which seems to have a lot more links to real research than your average diet book. One of the things the book claims is that the human body is capable of regulating its weight much the same way that it manages your blood sugar, temperature, and any number of other systems, so that regardless of what you eat your body has a strong preference for maintaining a particular weight. It describes this as the set-point theory.
Has anyone else on here had any experience with this? The big questions I have is if your body regulates your weight, how do we force it to change the setting? (it’s a long book that describes a lot of research and science and I’ve yet to get to the point where it actually talks about how to do it)
There is no question that the body, and really with the brain driving the show, defends not going too far from what it has learned to be its set point. “Too far” in this case generally means something like points more than 10% of body weight loss.
Fortunately 10% of body weight loss is also enough to gain the lion’s share of health benefits. The first and most important take home message is that losing more than that is a diminishing benefit to increasing difficulty game.
Exercise helps to convince the brain that a lower set point is appropriate. Hence the importance of exercise in maintaining fat loss. The impact on calories out is not so huge; the impact of more muscle mass changing the metabolic rate is small; the impact on convincing the brain what the “right” weight is is more dramatic. Also adequate and regular sleep (and not eating late in the evening) also has impact.
In general low satiety/high palatability foods help convince the brain that a higher set point is appropriate while higher satiety foods of moderate palatability help lower the set point … IOW eating real foods that fill one up with fiber and taste good but not great helps lower the set point some.
So the other take home message is that eating real foods, mostly plants, not too much (Thanks Pollan!), exercising regularly, and maintaining regular adequate sleep habits is your best bet to moving your set point down and thus to sustained fat loss. Dang all that science just to conclude common sense!
The longer you are obese the more convinced your brain is that that is the right range for you to be in. The best approach is to avoid obesity from childhood up and to make those diet, nutrition, exercise, and sleep changes that impact the set point as soon as possible.
I went from being 90lbs overweight to my ideal body weight (158lb) by reducing my food intake and increasing my fitness through regular exercise. I did it because I finally realized that I hated being fat more than I hated feeling hungry and in poor physical shape. I’ve always enjoyed eating and as a result I struggled with weight ever since I was a little kid. It wasn’t easy to change a lifetime of bad habits and there are no short cuts. It took me a year or two to lose the weight establish my new lifestyle habits. Yet, even now there are times the fat kid in me struggles to get out. It’s been 15 years now and my weight never fluctuates more than +/- 5lbs. And when I’m + 5lbs, I feel it and I do something about it. Because (personal mantra warning): nothing tastes as good as thin feels.
Exercise and eating enough food. Diets fail because your body thinks it’s starving, so it lowers your metabolism. That’s how concentration camp survivors (and some modern dieters) live on 600 calories a day.
Eat when you are hungry and exercise every day for a year and you couldn’t be heavy if you wanted to be.
If you have achieved a certain higher level of fitness in your life at some point, does that have any kind of permanent if not a years long persistent change in the makeup of your body regarding the ratio of muscle to fat?
For instance when I was around 19 I had ballooned up to 242 at one point and I did work out some, lifting weights but absolutely no cardio, I had muscle but also so much fat, a big gut, two or three chins.
Before I joined the army I had lost 60 pounds through dieting, and it took me six months, then I got really fit in the Army with all the running and exercise. I’ve been out for three years and I’ve gained a significant portion of that weight back I’m almost right at that same weight from when I was 19, but my appearance is way different, I don’t have the fat in my face, I don’t have a huge gut, I still exercise just not nearly as much as I did in the military. It seems like all those years of constant exercise made a difference in how my body carries the weight even though I still weigh nearly the same as I did when I was REALLY fat.
Anecdotally, I seem to have a set point at 240 pounds. Once not so bad when I was in good shape but not great now where my physical activity is limited. I have dieted down to 235, even a few pounds below, but without strictly limiting my food intake I’ll soon be at 240 again. For several years I’ve tried to get down to 225 where I’d be at a reasonable though less than ideal weight, but I just can’t get much below 235 or stay there.
Now I know my body doesn’t have a scale. It does have a good idea how much blood I have, how much energy I expend and how many calories I ingest daily. This phenomena is reported by too many people to ignore, but I’m curious if there is a detailed explanation for it. What does my body do to stay at that set point even though how much and what I eat varies? Do I end up burning fewer calories at rest? Does my body temperature vary? Lots of questions, not many answers. And the lingering feeling I’m not able to control my calories in and used very well.
It warrants mentioning that “eating enough food” should come with a caveat that it has to be the right kind of food. So, not more pizza, but more lean proteins, greens, vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, etc.
Also, I disagree with “eat when you’re hungry”. If I eat when I’m hungry, no amount of exercise at any intensity (and I was training for triathlons) would allow me to lose the weight I needed/wanted to lose. So don’t eat whenever you’re hungry. Eat enough to achieve your weight loss and fitness goals. And no more than that. Which means you’ll sometimes feel hungry. In my case, daily. Learn to live with that. It’s not as bad as it sounds.
Just as an anecdotal stab at giving you a possible answer: I wore a Fitbit Charge HR for six months. That’s the one that continuously monitors your heartrate and calculates your calorie burn based on that. And yes, your body is absolutely able to change its resting heart rate, and (the software claimed) your baseline calorie burn, by a surprising margin. For me, a woman of reproductive age, it happened in line with my monthly cycles. 75bpm at the highest, 65 bpm at the lowest.
It doesn’t really work like that. For really fat people hunger works different from how it works for thinner people: you tend to not be really hungry and then satiated after eating. Rather, you’re pretty much always somewhat hungry, and it doesn’t go away when you eat.
Also, it takes a while for the body to notice what you’ve eaten. So you can fool your body by eating bulky low calorie foods. For a while. But at some point, your body is going to catch on and you’ll stay hungry no matter how much celery you eat.
I had to train myself to eat smaller portions in order to lose weight.
Hm, how does that work? When you’re fit your heart rate is lower, but when you exercise your heart rate is higher. The two effects could easily cancel out.
As I said in my post, that’s Resting Heart Rate, which I think it calculates while you’re asleep (which it guesses based on extended periods of inactivity).
Sorry but for someone who has been obese this is clearly an untrue, inaccurate statement. You don’t need to read the book of the op but you may want to start with thesetwo NYT articles. If someone who has been obese and who has lost weight just eats when they are hungry they will be heavy, if they lost major amounts of weight, outside of that set point range, they will gain weight, even with moderate exercise.
Yes. And also of which fat. You’ve gained weight back but you likely have a lesser percent body fat and more muscle mass. Even without the same level of exercise as in the army you are likely maintaining the muscle you had gained there and your ongoing exercise is enough so that the fat you have gained is less likely to go into the most dangerous central visceral abdominal fat - the fat inside around your organs and inside your liver. Even without formal exercise your higher fitness probably translated into you moving around more in activities of daily living.
See those NYT articles for some detailed answers.
Nah, not cancel. Even an hour a day of 140 bpm only offsets 6 bpm the other 23; you’ve lowered your heart rate otherwise by more than that and not only at rest.
Your resting heart rate is lower when you are fit and you will raise it less with usual daily activity because you are fit. But you also move more during the day. The simple overlooked fact is that a physically fit individual is also less likely to be someone who is completely sedentary when not exercising: when awake you are less likely to be “at rest.”
Please note: what is going on in the brain and the body is very different in the context of an efficient heart with a high stroke volume needing fewer beats to do its job, and in the context of slowed metabolism, possibly marginally slowing down the heart rate at rest, resultant of major weight loss. While the fit individual moves during the rest of the day the brain is telling the body of the person who lost major weight to only move when necessary. You’d be amazed how many calories are spent, and not spent, during that “non-exercise activity thermogenesis” (NEAT).