Stop Yo Yo Dieting
and Stop the Metabolism Problems
The five factors are interrelated and affect metabolism in four main ways, which are also interrelated and interdependent. The four ways are: the starvation response, altered body composition, carbohydrate sensitivity, and hormone imbalance. I'll go into some of these mechanisms in greater detail later in the book, but basically, here is how these metabolism-altering conditions come about.
THE STARVATION RESPONSE
When you go on a diet, your brain misreads the lack of food as a life-threatening time of famine and slows the rate at which your body burns fuel for energy. Your brain then signals your metabolism to slow down to conserve energy. This is the starvation response. Chronic dieting also usually leads to nutritional deficiencies, so normal metabolism is not supported.
Any time you crash diet and cut your calories drastically to lose weight, you are temporarily slowing down your metabolism. As explained earlier, whenever we eat less food than we need to maintain our weight, the brain thinks we are starving and that we are going to die. Let's say you usually eat 1,800 calories a day and you go down to an 800-calorie-a-day diet. Your brain does not understand that you are not a hunter-gatherer; it doesn't realize that you actually have enough food in your home to feed a family of four in India. It thinks you don't know where your next meal is coming from and goes on red alert, sending a message to your thyroid to slow down your metabolism to conserve the energy saved as muscle and fat and keep you going until food is plentiful again. You may lose weight on 800 calories, but once you start eating more again, you will gain the weight back because your metabolism has slowed down. Even if you go on a maintenance diet of 1,200 to 1,500 calories, which theoretically might be the amount needed to maintain your new weight, you will gain. You have actually altered the function of your thyroid gland, which in turn slows down your metabolic rate, reducing the calories you require.
you are burning less fuel during a diet, you are still burning some. Unfortunately, at the beginning of a diet, the fuel you burn is predominantly in the form of protein, which comes from breaking down the tissue in your lean muscle. You will burn fat last the opposite of what a weight-loss program should do. Once you start eating again after a crash diet, you usually gain weight back very quickly, and most of it is in the form of fat, not muscle. Until your metabolism adjusts and levels out again, you will continue to gain fat. This changes your body composition and increases your fat-to-muscle ratio and this is exactly what we don't want to happen
ALTERED BODY COMPOSITION
Altered body composition is too much body fat in proportion to muscle tissue. The more fat you carry in proportion to muscle, the fewer calories your body needs to burn to maintain its BMR, and the easier it is to gain or regain weight in the form of fat.
Your body is made of bone, muscle, and fat. What we are most concerned with here is the ratio of muscle to fat because it is the fat on your body that makes you overweight. In fact, a better term for your condition would be " over-fat." Most body fat is not very metabolically active and it doesn't require much energy to maintain once it's there. Muscle tissue, on the other hand, is metabolically active it contracts and relaxes and requires much more energy to function than does our inactive fat tissue. Therefore, it makes sense that the more muscle mass you have, the faster your metabolism runs and the more calories you burn. On the other hand, the more fat you have, the slower your metabolism and the fewer calories you burn. Several things influence your fat-to-muscle ratio: crash and yo-yo dieting, lack of exercise, chronic stress, toxins, genetics, and gender.
DIETING
As mentioned above, your body sees crash dieting as an emergency situation called "starvation." It causes you to burn protein before fat, as fat is more valuable for protecting the body, so when you gain the weight back, it is mostly in the form of fat leaving you with a higher proportion of fat to muscle than before you began the diet. The loss-gain pattern of yo-yo dieting similarly shifts your body composition. As you repeatedly diet and gain and lose, your body fat goes up while your muscle mass goes down or stays the same. Even if it's the same thirty-five pounds you have been bouncing around since the dawn of time, you may have noticed that each time you gain it back, you are fatter. Your clothing feels tighter even though you may weigh the same as when you first started dieting. That's because fat weighs one-half what muscle does. So, for example, when you lose twenty pounds of weight as body fat, it looks like you've lost forty pounds.
This change in body composition is one of the major problems I see with a lot of my patients they have completely ignored what they are doing to their physiology and are only concentrating on the number on the scale. They are not considering whether they are losing fat or muscle, just as long as they see the scale move. Now, remember I explained that when you lose weight as body fat, it looks like you've lost about twice as much weight? Well, the opposite is true when you gain the weight back after dieting. For example, let's say a patient who is 5'5" comes to see me. Let's say she started out weighing 180 pounds. Of that, 60 pounds were fat, meaning she had 35 percent body fat. She crash dieted and lost 35 pounds, which brought her weight down to 145. However, only 18 pounds of her weight loss was fat; the other 17 pounds was a combination of lean muscle and water. When she started to eat normally again, she quickly gained back 25 pounds as body fat, plus 10 pounds of muscle and water. She gained back 7 more pounds of body fat, leaving her with 4 percent more body fat than when she started, even though she weighs the same as when she started. Her body composition has changed in that her lean body mass (muscle) went down a bit from the weight loss and her fat mass has gone up from the weight gain. The next time she dieted she had to lose even more fat to get results. This constant gaining back of body fat is what makes it so difficult to lose weight. Each time she loses and gains weight her body fat will go up even further. This scenario of gain, lose, gain more, lose less is very typical, but my program breaks that cycle.
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