A study that casts some light on why we diet and can’t lose weight…and also points up why one rodent is not like another. IE, if you’re doing a study, species matters.
There’s a second study like this one, which points to a hormonal deficiency at birth, while this one seems to indicate it could occur later in life.
Some of these studies are in Petri dishes, where it doesn’t do very much about that bag of donuts we just consumed…but some are not. At least they’re identifying chemical pathways, which could point in useful directions. The way we can not eat but not lose weight is a very complex question, as it appears, going all the way down into cellular levels, and may have a survival value when it comes to lean times, or when it comes to the need of women to sustain a child. And it’s become a problem to high-stress periods of life when people eat for energy and aren’t getting that either, as this study sort of points out. Just kinda interesting, in solving one of life’s little injustices. Jane and I have been kind of in a holding pattern on the diet, where it comes to dropping any points, but we’ve not fallen victim to the massive re-gain. We’re getting through the fall, when we have my birthday and Jane’s birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Having our nice holiday food, but being mindful that not every day in between is a holiday. Post New Year’s we’re going back on a more restrained diet to finish the Battle of the Bulge. The weight didn’t come on us all in one year. It’s taking more than a year to lose it. But we’ll get there.
It’s probably self-evident, but people who go on “starvation diets” rarely lose weight as quickly after a period of time because as a survival mechanism, the body slows its metabolism to preserve its energy reserves. Extended “starvation” leads to worse things, such as metabolizing muscle proteins for their energy, and eventually, there’s nothing left, or the amount of energy required to metabolize those tissues for their energy is greater than the amount of energy that can be derived.
So far, my weight seems to be around 180 pounds, at least, going by the way my pants hang around my waist and the number of notches I have to tighten my belt. The belt that was a year ago notched on the second hole of five holes, is now almost too big for my waist. The pants that were tight a year ago are now so loose that I can actually take them off without having to unbutton and unzip the fly. To me, that’s a major accomplishment in losing weight. But there’s been a price, too. Such as yesterday, at kendo practice, I was very shaky, almost as though my blood sugar was too low. I’ve had all sorts of tests, including blood drawn right in the middle of one of those episodes. “We can’t find anything wrong with you, your blood sugar is fine, your insulin is fine, liver functions are fine, pancreas functions are fine, thyroid functions are fine……in other words, we haven’t got a clue.” Usually it takes 30 minutes or so for it to go away, which tells me that there’s something liver-related, requiring the proper hormone to begin metabolizing the fat into sugars. In the meantime, I’m pretty much wasted, unless I can get something in me that helps get sugar to the brain a bit faster, so I do have a sports drink with me at practice. I do try not to overeat after such an attack, although it’s very easy to do, because the feeling of hunger doesn’t go away quickly. A potassium-rich food sometimes helps, such as a banana or orange, but I don’t always have those with me, either. I suspect I’ll never know what it is that causes this. I used to think it was because I’d have coffee and pastries for breakfast, but I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was 26 years old, and I’ve had these episodes since before I was 8 years old…..
Joe, the reason for heavy protein intake while fasting is so it gets metabolized, not muscle. I got ill enough a few months ago to lose some strength, but I had no problem rebuilding muscle while Alternative Day Fasting, with Calories and protein as below.
It seems to me, the trouble with dieting all the time is dieting all the time. It really calls for absolute obsession. Maybe since you’re dieting intermittently, you might want to shift to an intermittent diet? (Intermittent Fasting in Wikipedia.) The easiest is probably 5:2.
Just two days a week–any two days, consistent or inconsistent–eat only 500 kcal with 46 grams of protein (men 600, 56). Especially starting out, feel free to have a big, filling almost-midnight snack to make the following day’s “fast” easier. And it’s a lot easier than it seems before you try it. The idea is to put your body into ketosis, fat burning. (Check with your doc if you have any metabolic conditions that might make this a problem.)
The great thing is, if it just isn’t working, you can blow off the fast day, and just say, “Mañana.” Outside of getting the protein up and kcals down a couple days, you can eat anything you want. You could do this right through the holidays. Who wants to eat much on the day after Thanksgiving dinner, anyway? When you get hungry, grab 500 kcal of leftover turkey.
At a certain point, if you’re going to keep the weight off—at least in my experience—the only way is to arrange a diet you can live on and just change your way of eating entirely.
What Jane and I have done is get onto a diet which lets us snack a little in the evening, lets us have a wine or the like in the evening, lets us break for a holiday, event, or evening out, and then go back to it. And we can go on like this indefinitely. We may yo-yo a wee bit, but we yo-yo right down again, and a bit further, so the net is a loss.
Typical of strict is diet bars for breakfast and lunch, supper of, say, a chicken Caesar, period. Typical of a binge is most anything we want, but! because we don’t eat monster portions most of the time—we tend to eat half the treat and take the other half home.
That may end up as two days, but then it’s back down to ‘normal.’ It’s not the treat that does you in—it’s the repeated treats, ime. And in a curious way—the treats are really treats when they’re infrequent. I began realizing by eating anything I wanted, I was not really appreciating it the way I do when it’s less ordinary. And I do a mean Pepper Chicken Caesar, with predone unbreaded chicken bits, lightly fried, then dosed with a tablespoon of black pepper and half a cup of Parmesan, stir wildly, then use as topping for two Caesar salads. The pepper is spicy, the cheese is cheesy, and those are at least two of the fannish food groups.
Too true CJ. We’ve had some family drama the last 3 months and there’s nothing like stress to send me back to noshing stuff I shouldn’t and too much of the stuff I should. I’ve gone back to tracking every BLT (Bite, Lick & Taste).
Weight gain and weight loss are complex activities, and are affected by food intake, type of food, exercise, stress, illness, genetic predispositions to weight gain or loss, chemicals in the environment, ….
Heck, even whether your grandmother was eating enough while she was pregnant with your parent has an effect.
What’s worse, people react to being over or under weight in different ways, with ‘healthy’ being individual to each.
I must say that I hate the ‘One size fits all’ diet advice we all get, all the time.
ISTR that after WW2 they found letting POW’s eat ad libidum(?) didn’t cause weight recovery. They had to keep them on a restricted diet, a very good one, and build it back slowly.
They tried to restrict my husband when he was released from being a POW in Korea. He was having none of that and broke out of the base hospital in Honolulu to have a steak. They tried hauling him back to the hospital but he and his fellow POW’s found that the hospital commandant couldn’t really do anything to them so they came to an agreement – they could do what they wanted as long as they reported back for the flight back to the mainland.
Bravo for the steak raid. So good!
The commandant didn’t believe they would leave if he removed their clothes. They left in their PJ’s and bathrobes and picked up clothes in town.
Never underestimate the willpower of a military member bent on doing what THEY think is right…..
Besides, these men had just gone through the hell of a POW camp, some REMF commandant at a hospital isn’t going to give them any problem at all…..
Is ‘REMF’ suitable for public consumption? Despite association with a lot of Marines from K-Bay, that’s one I haven’t heard.
Heh, I wondered what it meant, too, so I put it into whatever search engine my computer is defaulting to today and got an answer that made sense in context. And no, definitely not suitable for public consumption. 🙂
Rear Echelon Mother F***** -weird librarian memory kicks in.
Ah. Middle management with little direct experience, but tasked with enforcing higher-up rules, despite their inanity. Teasel, that was my later guess as well 😉
Lol! Gotta love their determination!
DH is a Marine.
I keep thinking I’ll start hearing more docs and media blurbs talk about how stress creates reverse T3 dominance (thyroid stuff). Talk about messing with metabolic rate at the cellular level!