To Diet and Lose Weight: Not As Easy As Reduced Intake

Flippant, I was, when I was younger, when I said the way to reduce your weight is to simply eat less. In a way I was right, but in my naivety I did not know the complexity of the problem. Age has a way of providing more wisdom to the problem. It turns out that I am not alone, as the percentage of obese people in the Western world is now alarming and rising. This is a big problem that needs to be solved.

As you reduce your caloric input, your body’s metabolism slows down, and fights your weight loss. As you exercise you build up a stronger need to eat, and might negate the measly calorie deficit you just burned off. As anyone over 40 knows, the body likes homeostasis and refuses to change. Once you put on excess fat the body fights to retain it, as if it is fighting for its/your life. Though this is your body, there is a built-in mechanism to self-protect. Thankfully there is new research that might shed more light on the problem, if it cannot solve it.

As a side note, note that excess fat is really bad for you. Not only can it cause blockages of arteries leading to heart attacks and strokes, besides energy fat stores all sorts of hormones and toxins which you really don’t need. Fat does not discriminate. We are all best without excesses of this indiscriminate storage mechanism.

This article is one of many that has delved deeply into the difficulty and futility of dieting. Though specifically dealing with exercise and its effects on losing weight (not very much), there are many other golden nuggets of knowledge.

To be sure, you cannot exercise enough in the day to significantly burn off calories and lose weight. An hour of cardio can be negated with a single slice of pizza. Nearly 60-80% of your daily caloric burning is metabolism, and only 20% can be from exercise. We also can’t regulate our metabolism, as this is not under our control. In fact, there may be an upper limit to caloric expenditure through exercise, called “the constrained model”, after which the body eases up and preserves calories. In other words, the more you do does not necessarily correlate to the more calories you burn. The body is a lot smarter than that. There’s a law of diminishing returns at work.

This is all interesting and points out what we don’t know. But what do we know from long-term weight loss successes includes:

  • weekly weighting on a scale
  • restrict caloric intake
  • restrict high fat foods
  • pay attention to portion size
  • daily exercise

Exercise can help maintain a healthy weight, but not help you reduce your weight.

If it was so easy, most of us would not have a weight problem. Understanding the mechanisms at work will go far in finding a solution. We move forward.

2019 Oct 24 Can a new generation of weight-loss drugs finally help patients win at the losing game?

But lifestyle changes alone also have a limited impact on obesity rates. Almost every single study has shown that weight loss is usually limited to three to 10 per cent of initial body weight with behavioural treatments…

2016 Apr Why you shouldn’t exercise to lose weight, explained with 60+ studies

2018 Sept 04 Most of us misunderstand metabolism. Here are 9 facts to clear that up

2014 Nov 27 Surprisingly simple tips from 20 experts about how to lose weight and keep it off

2018 Jan 11 When you lose weight, your fat cells don’t just let go of fat: Fat cells store hormones, toxins, vitamins, and many other things. When you lose weight these are all released into your body. It is best to not have then around in the first place.

2021 Sept 13 How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity: The idea of reduce intake will help you lose weight (energy imbalance) is widely accepted but could be very wrong. It is the regulation of insulin that will reduce body fat.

By the mid-1960s, researchers studying fat storage and metabolism had established unambiguously that the hormone insulin dominated the regulation of fat storage. While insulin works conspicuously to control blood sugar — defects in insulin production and responsiveness are primary causes of diabetes — it does so partly by stimulating the uptake of fat into fat cells, inhibiting its release and inhibiting its use as energy in non-adipose tissue. No tissue in the body is as sensitive to insulin’s action as fat tissue — “exquisitely sensitive,” as these researchers often described it…

In the case of obesity, the hormonal/constitutional hypothesis also encountered dogmatic resistance in response to its single most direct practical implication: Diets that can successfully resolve obesity are not those that induce us to eat less, per energy-balance thinking, but those that reduce circulating levels of insulin, accomplished most effectively by replacing dietary carbohydrates — sugars, starchy vegetables and grains, and the like — with fat…

These physicians, an ever-growing but still small minority, find that when they induce their patients to restrict carbohydrates but not calories, their patients can achieve and maintain a healthy weight with relative ease and get healthier in the process.

Your Workout Burns Fewer Calories Than You Think: Our bodies compensate for at least a quarter of the calories we expend during exercise, undermining our best efforts to lose weight by working out.

A more intractable problem with using exercise for weight loss, he continued, is that exercise realistically burns few calories, period. To drop pounds, we also will have to eat less.

“Half a cookie or half a can of cola” after a half-hour walk, and you will have taken in more calories than you burned, he said, however much or little you compensate.

Weight Loss (Hormones vs Calorie Counting)

The sexy secrets of body fat storage: We’re talkin’ bout hormones, baby.

2023 Feb Best Diet(s) for Type 2 Diabetes | Dr. Nicola Guess: To reduce your type 2 diabetes risk the most important factor is weight loss. All other aspects such as protein, which diet you do, matters very little, 2:05 “The best evidence, right now, is that weight loss, however you achieve it, is the primary determinant of diabetes remission. 22:35 lose 5-7%, however you achieve it, seems to prevent the development of type 2 diabetes, 23:46 prevention of weight gain is relatively easy compared to weight loss, prevention of pre-diabetes is easier than prevention of type 2 diabetes 24:41 “To when I think insulin resistance, to me that is synonymous with overweight..the proportion of population who are overweight and obesity is pretty similar to the proportion who have insulin resistance 25:25 Weight loss has such a huge effect on fasting insulin that nothing else matters that much 29:47 the prevention of type 2 diabetes and cardiometabolic disease, maintaining a healthy weight and doing a good amount of physical activity are so above and beyond in terms of effect size of your risks of type 2 diabetes..nothing else really matters.

2021 What causes diabetes? | ft. Prof. Roy Taylor: 1:33 cause of diabetes: carrying around more fat than the individual can cope with. each person has a fat threshold. Diabetes occurs when you exceed this threshold.

2022 How to reverse Type 2 Diabetes | ft. Roy Taylorreduce body fat below the personal fat threshold and type 2 diabetes will go into remission
2022 May 09Reversing Type 2 DiabetesDr Jason Fung: reverse T2 diabetes by reducing intake and changing diet, it is all about lifestyle and diet

2025 Jan 13 Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?: A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity.: A very interesting take on ultra-processed foods. There is nuance on the subject.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *