Weight loss is not all about cutting or burning a few calories, this sounds interesting but it does not actually work that way. Over the years studies and research have said that cutting calories reduces weight loss, this I say has not been effectively proven to be accurate. To have that weight loss you have always dreamed of, all you need do is to control your body’s set weight (BSW). Body Set Weight (BSW), also called an appestat or obesistat, is found in our bodies which is an essentially which is a thermostat for body fatness. It is very wrong for you to think that you can eat anything around you because the food is readily available.
Instead, In our body we tend to have multiple overlapping powerful satiety mechanisms to stop eating. We have stretch receptors in our stomach to signal when it is too full. We have powerful satiety hormones such as peptide YY and
cholescystokinin that stop us from eating. Because it is really, really hard to keep eating once we’re full.
From an evolutionary perspective, these satiety mechanism makes a lot of sense. Our body is designed to stay within
certain body fat parameters. Calories is not a physiologic notion, our body has no ‘calorie’ receptors and does not know how many calories we eat or don’t eat. Over the past several centuries, we’ve decoded many of the human metabolic pathways. A calorie of carbohydrate is metabolised entirely differently from fat or protein. So why pretend they are the
same? It’s like saying that humans and a tree trunk share the same physiology because we both weigh the same and would produce the same heat if burned in a calorimeter. Believing this totally ridiculous notion is a big part of why we’re losing the war on obesity. Take artificial sweeteners. It has no calories, so we can fool our taste buds, but can we fool our appestat? Not at all. How many people do you know have lost weight by switching to sweeteners? If all we had to do to lose weight was eat fake sugar and fake fat and no calories, we’d all be eating Olestra and Stevia and lose weight, there would be no obesity crisis.
The Body Set Weight (BSW) sets an ideal body fatness that it defends just like our house thermostat. If we are too skinny, we try to gain weight. If we are too fat, we try to lose weight. The clearest experimental demonstration of this was done by Dr. Rudy Leibel in 1995. In this experiment he took volunteers, and overfed them to make them gain 10% more weight. Then he returned them to their regular weight, and then to 10% or 20% weight loss. At each point, he measured the basal metabolic rate (BMR), or how much energy (calories) the body is expending. After 10% weight gain, the body burns about 500 calories more per day compared to baseline. As the body returns to it’s original weight, so does the metabolic rate. After 10% weight loss, the body burns about 300 calories per day less.
The body tries very hard to maintain its BSW in the original position, acting just like our house thermostat. This directly contradicts the ridiculous Calories In/ Calories Out (CICO) viewpoint that hold that simply eating too many calories causes body fatness without regard to the BSW or satiety hormones or pretty much any other physiologic signaling. If you deliberately overeat, your body tries to burn it off.
It is advised to cut 500 calories per day in order to lose 1 pound per week. Initially weight goes down to 185 pounds, but then our appestat kicks in to make us gain weight. We become more hungry and basal metabolism slows in order to regain the weight. So we try even harder by cutting more calories. But our body responds by further slowing our metabolism. In an attempt to lose weight we continually fight ourselves, if that didn’t work. What is a simpler solution? Turn down the appestat or BSW. The body also uses a negative feedback loop in the BSW. Excessive insulin leads an increase in the size of fat cells. They produce more of the hormone leptin which travels to the brain and signals that ‘we’re too fat’. Appetite decreases, we stop eating, and this lowers insulin. This signals our body to start burning fat instead of eating and storing it and returns us to our original, desired BSW.
This feedback loop keeps our weight relatively stable despite wide fluctuations in calorie intake and calorie expenditures day after day, week after week and year after year. After all, most people become obese by gaining 1–2 pounds per year. Over 40 years, this can add up. Assume that 1 pound of body fat is roughly 3500 calories. In a year, we might eat 2000 cal/day times 365 days = 730,000 calories. To gain 1 pound a year (3500 calories), we would need to accurately match calorie intake and expenditure to a 99.5% accuracy rate. Obesity is therefore not a caloric balance problem, but rather the gradual increase in the BSW thermostat (appestat) over time.
In normal human obesity, this could be due to a number of reasons, but eating foods high in refined grains, eating frequently, eating lots of sugar (causes hepatic insulin resistance directly) are all culprits in keeping insulin levels high despite leptin’s best efforts to curb appetite to lower insulin. If insulin is extremely low, the body loses weight continuously no matter how many calories are eaten. The BSW is created by the balance of insulin effect versus leptin effect, just as the thermostat is regulated by the balance of heat versus cooling. In those who are obese, we know that insulin effect has prevailed over leptin effect. For example, if we inject exogenous insulin, we gain fat because we have tilted the balance towards insulin.
The battle royale for the BSW is Insulin vs. Leptin. One is trying to make us gain fat, the other is trying to lose fat. It’s Rocky vs. Apollo Creed. These two heavyweight hormones that control body fat percentage are trading body blows. If leptin wins, then we are able to reduce appetite and/ or increase basal metabolic rates sufficiently to burn off the excess calories being eaten. This is exactly what we saw in Rudy Leibel’s study of deliberate weight gain.
If you are obese, it’s because insulin prevailed over leptin. As the fat cells stay over-filled, they produce more and more leptin in an attempt to fight insulin. However, the root problem of hyperinsulinemia has not been solved (eating too much sugar, too many refined carbohydrates, eating constantly), so insulin also continues to march higher. And persistent high levels of hormones result in resistance. Eventually, persistent, high levels of leptin cause leptin resistance. Persistent high levels of insulin cause insulin resistance. To make sure insulin is reduced in our body we take note of this little solutions of overcoming body fats, and these are:
- Moderate or less intake of proteins and natural fats.
- You should not eat all the time (intermittent fasting).
- Eat unprocessed foods (reduces insulin effects).
- Eat less sugar or avoid it entirely.
If we are to use the standard dietary advice of cutting dietary fat, reducing calories but eating lots of carbohydrates and eating 6 or 7 times per day. Since dietary fat has little insulin effect, this caloric reduction strategy has not reduced insulin effect and makes no difference to this Insulin vs. Leptin battle. This is precisely the dietary advice given over the last 40 years that has failed so spectacularly. Eating frequently means constant stimulation of insulin, which is also detrimental to weight loss efforts.To overcome obesity, one need to help in the Insulin vs Leptin fight by reducing or lowering insulin, leptin is already maxed out. The only thing left is to reduce insulin.
Actually the above solution or advice is what people would normally give you in order to overcome that body fat of yours, because somehow they tried it and it worked for them.