Two months! Woo hoo!
This girl who’s blog I follow has been talking a lot lately about Fat 2 Fit Radio and their theories on weight loss. Basically, they think that you should figure out what you would need to eat to maintain your goal weight (they offer handy dandy calculators on their site for finding both what your goal weight should be and what you should eat at that weight). The idea is that if you stick to the number of calories you’d need to maintain your goal weight, you’ll eventually reach that goal weight without ever having to diet. They admit you might have to drop your calories by 200-300 a day to lose those last couple pounds, but that otherwise it works. They also insist that you should never eat below your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate, or how many calories it takes to keep you alive if you’re, say, in a coma).
Now, to get nerdy. I understand most everyone gets this, but it helps me think, so it’s happening anyway. Our body is like a machine, and our food is the fuel. Everyone knows that exercise burns through that fuel. Everyone also knows that we become overweight when we start adding more fuel than we burn through. Eventually, our body starts building back up tanks (fat reserves) to hold what it doesn’t use. Think of it like adding five gallons of gas to your car a day, but only using four. Those extra gallons are going to build up to the point that you’ll go to fill up one day, and the tank will already be full. So you fill up one of those ugly red jugs, stick it in your trunk, and go on your merry way. To lose the weight, we need to start tapping into those reserves, which we do by creating a deficit, or burning more fuel than we take in.
It isn’t our BMR that we use as reference in this case. I mean, we’re not in comas, right? We use the number of calories it takes us to get through a day in our current lifestyle. Which is obviously more than our BMR. All our BMR provides fuel for is the basics: basic brain function, all our organs running, that fun stuff. Perhaps the occasional muscle twitch. Even if we’re vegging out, we still do more than that: we scratch our nose, lift the glass off the table, raise the remote, walk to the bathroom, etc etc.
So, to lose the weight, we take that number, and somehow subtract between 500 and 1000 (for the 1-2lb a week weight loss). We either do this by eating less (adding only 3 gallons of fuel) or burning more (driving an extra loop around town), but ideally with a little of both.
Every source I’ve read has said that you shouldn’t go below your BMR (because we’re not in comas, people). You start depriving your body of fuel, it’s going to stop running properly.
So, going on all that, the idea suggested by Fat 2 Fit makes sense. By eating to maintain a lower weight, you’ll automatically create a deficit, so you’ll start burning through your fat. However, there are a few things about them that’s bothered me.
First, they want you to pay for the first season of their podcast. This just isn’t right to me. But okay, you have to pay the bills somehow. Second, when they were talking about why you should never eat below your BMR, they said it was because your body would go into starvation mode. Since joining Lose It!, I’ve seen a lot about this starvation mode, and I’ve looked into it. Everyone talks about it, whether they call it “starvation mode” or “your body’s natural response,” if they’re talking about weight loss, they’ve mentioned it. But there seems to be some debate as to what it actually is. These guys at Fat 2 Fit were saying how in starvation mode, your body clings to fat and won’t let you lose the weight.
Now, before I start this rant, let me be clear that I hold no degree what so ever and am totally talking out of my ass based on what I’ve read. Do your own research, talk to your doctor, whatever, but don’t hold my word as gospel.
According to all that I’ve read, that’s false. Starvation mode, or whatever the hell you want to call it, does happen, and it does make it more difficult to lose weight, but your body doesn’t just stop losing all together. If it did, anorexia wouldn’t work. When they showed footage of all these starving people in these third world countries, they would look normal, not like skeletons with skin. Based on the research I’ve done, starvation mode is a response our bodies have developed based on thousands of years of evolution. Back in the day, when we were a traveling people wearing pelts, if we underwent an extreme caloric deficit for an extended period of time, it meant that there was a food shortage. Our bodies would slow our metabolisms down so that we burned through our fat reserves more slowly, but they would still burn through them. Think of the fat grizzly that goes into hibernation and comes out much thinner. The other thing our bodies would do is break down our lean muscle mass, since the nutrients we need to function can’t all be found in our fat reserves.
Now, in present day, we have food endlessly at our disposal. We binge on Mickey D’s and Breyer’s ice cream, Doritos and Pop Tarts. And then we crash diet to lose the weight. Our bodies don’t know that there’s no shortage in food, it just knows that it suddenly doesn’t have enough calories to function properly. So our metabolism slows, and we start burning through larger amounts of our lean muscle mass in addition to our fat reserves. Even if we’re taking in our BMR or just over, if we exercise enough to drop that deficit below that number, the same thing is going to happen.
This doesn’t happen from one crazy low calorie day, or even a few crazy low calorie days. It’s over an extended period of time.
So, after you’ve entered starvation mode, and your body believes you’re currently in a food shortage, when you increase your calories for whatever reason, your body goes “Food!” and works to rebuild it’s fat reserves, not knowing when its next big burst of calories will be. The result? Your weight goes up.
And after all that lovely news, we’re all thinking “So how the hell am I supposed to lose weight and keep it off?” And this is why Fat 2 Fit’s idea makes so much sense to me. By eating more (at what your maintenance level would be for your goal weight), your body doesn’t think that you’re in a food shortage. So it willingly (and easily) lets go of its fat reserves. When you do get into maintenance mode, there’s no big change, as that’s what you’ve been eating all along.
I have Matt testing this out for everyone (gotta love using husbands as guinea pigs). If it works well for him, I might ease into it (as Lose It! currently has me about 100 calories below what the site says is my BMR). He’s only upped his calories for a day, but he’s already talking about how he has more energy, he feels less restricted, he’s less tempted to binge (since he can have more things in smaller portions), and he no longer feels like he’s on a diet. I’ll keep everyone posted.
