Calories, Weight Loss & Weight Gain

Remember how I told you I was snowed in on Friday? Well it’s been exceptionally warm today, so as a result I’m at home dealing with a flooded basement. Awesome.

Somewhere in-between ripping up carpet and tearing down drywall I managed to check my email this morning and received a very interesting question:

“Have you ever met someone who was eating too few calories for weight loss and then when they ate more, they lost weight?”

In my opinion fitness experts are making a huge mistake telling people that you can actually eat so little that you stop-losing weight.

Only in the diet industry could people get away with making a statement like this that lacks so much common sense.

I think this misconception is caused by the articles you read in bodybuilding and fitness magazines and is a prime example of obsessive compulsive eating (OCE).

If you dig down into the history of this theory you will find that it comes from the idea that all we have to do is slightly cut our calories to lose weight at a super accelerated rate.

Let’s analyze the classic example of a man attempting to get shredded by reducing is calorie intake from 2400 down to 2200.

Firstly, it’s important to realize that none of us really know exactly how much we eat.

Sure, we can get a rough idea by using tools like fitday.com, and we might be able to say we eat around 2400 every day, but we could be off by a hundred or so calories in either direction simply as the result of some bad rounding and incorrect estimating.

For instance, a food that is 100 Calories per serving could actually be 104, and the 2 servings you ate could actually have been closer to 2.5. These small little underestimations can all ad up pretty quickly.

Secondly, and here’s the kicker, we really have NO IDEA if 2400 was the right “maintenance” number to begin with!

Perhaps for the person in the example a true maintenance intake is actually 2332 Calories and the 2400 that he has been eating represents a very slow almost undetectable steady weight gain.

Now a reduction down to 2200 calories is barely a 4% reduction in calories. And, I guarantee that in this situation on any given day, 2200 could easily become 2300 and thus cause no weight change at all.

Hopefully by now you are seeing why over-analyzing your nutrition and focusing too much on numbers can cause “Paralysis by Analysis”. Things that should work on paper may not work in real life.

It may be true that over the long run even small changes like this can create big results, but it takes some serious amount of appraisal and adaptation to make weight loss happen at more drastic speeds.

So forget all of the numbers and equations and stick with what we know for sure-
If a certain amount of calories does not make you lose weight, then that amount of calories is the amount it takes to maintain your current weight at your current activity level.

To lose more weight you can either decrease the calories you eat, or increase the calories you burn. It does not matter who you are or what you do; this is the easiest most logical approach.
It also does NOT matter what person X eats or how much person Y exercises, it only matters how much YOU currently eat and if YOU are currently losing weight.

If you aren’t losing weight and you want to, then you must adjust your calorie deficit.
The idea that there is a dieting threshold and that dieting too much will actually stop weight loss is silly.

I think it is important to for us to look outside of health and fitness occasionally. A very harsh example of the effects of extreme caloric deprivation is people who suffer from anorexia.
These poor people reduce their calories to ridiculously low levels to the point where they waste away until they die.

They never hit a magic number where they stop losing weight. AND they see massive losses of muscle mass, so by the classic definition they would have 'slower' metabolisms, yet they still lose weight until they are a walking skeleton, and then unfortunately for many of them, until they are deceased.

I know this is a very harsh example, but it puts things into perspective, and corrects our myopic “health and fitness” view of how the body works.

People who advocate the idea of “eating so little that you stop losing weight” should Google image search anorexia just to remind themselves how ridiculous they sound. And, imagine how they must make families who have lost loved ones to anorexia feel when they say; “if you eat too little you won’t lose weight”.

Another, less tragic example are long distance runners.

These people eat a lot. And they eat a lot of Carbohydrates. But because of their training they still spend large periods of time in a caloric deficit.

This combination of intense exercise and not being able to make up for this level of training with the amount of foods they eat keeps their bodyweight and body fat at extremely low levels. It does not make sense that eating even less would slow their weight loss.

"Amy, you're looking a little thin, better start eating less so you don't lose any more weight"

Lastly the idea that eating more will actually cause you to lose weight, is just typical of the OCE confusion that they use to fill the fitness magazines and that over the years has managed to dig its claws into the dieting paradigm.

If a long distance runner started to eat more food, they would start losing more weight? Similarly, would an anorexic lose more weight by eating more? I don’t think so.

Now I’m not condoning extremely harsh low calorie diets (I think a 10-20% reduction from a true maintenance is ideal).

What I am advocating is careful appraisal of the progression of a diet, and logical problem analysis for logical solutions. Follow this paradigm and nothing about weight loss ever has to be drastic.

If you lower your calories you will lose weight. If you continue to lose weight you will eventually hit a new weight that your lower calorie intake can maintain. This means you will stop losing weight.

If you lower your calories slightly again you will start losing weight again until your body reaches the weight that your new lower calorie intake can support. These changes may be very minor, but they still need to be made.

I will admit that drug use may skew everything I just said, as would people who are attempting to get to super freaky levels of near death body fat for a real bodybuilding show.

I’ve spoken with many trainers who have very unique stories about top level athletes who are getting down to incredibly low levels of body fat and who have stalled in their fat loss. If you are trying to go from 4.5% body fat down to 4% you are way outside of normal human physiology and I admit I’m not an expert in this area.

In this unique situation things like “refeeding” days may actually be warranted. Again, preparing people to be on a stage, near death, flexing for an audience is not my area of expertise.

For normal people trying to lose weight, maybe even get lean enough to have a visible "6-pack" of abs, everything I just said is my educated opinion of the way things work.

There is a lot of confusion out there, but none of it is really logical.

This is why I hate Obsessive Compulsive Eating. It just doesn’t make any logical sense.

Its time we started thinking like children again. If you asked a classroom full of 8 year olds what happens if they eat too much they’d all yell out “we’d get fat”. Ask them what happens when they eat to little, they yell, “we’d get skinny”.

This is why I follow the Eat Stop Eat program. I simply don't beleive that equations, calculations and estimations are effective tools for weight loss. I like finding an amount of food that I can eat and maintain my current weight, then reducing the amount I eat so I lose weight. I just makes the most sense to me.

BP

Tom Venuto vs. grrlAthlete and Eat Stop Eat

If you are a regular reader of fitness and nutrition blogs, then there is a great chance that you have heard the name Tom Venuto. Tom is a well respected authority in the online weight loss community.


So why am I blogging about Tom?


Well in one of Tom's recent blog posts the issue of starvation mode was discussed (You can read it HERE). Specifically, Tom discusses an unnamed email that he disagrees with.


While I respect the fact that Tom blanked out the website name, but he didn't need to. The email was from the grrlAthlete newsletter. And since I'm involved in this site I stand behind the newsletter and its contents.


Here is a little background for you, Tom makes a living selling a weight loss program that "is based on keeping you OUT of starvation mode or minimizing its effects", while my program Eat Stop Eat, is based on the idea that when it comes to short periods of fasting combined with weight training, starvation mode does not exist.


pretty confusing. Two guys saying two completely different things about what sounds like the exact same thing. Well let's take a deeper look.


Firstly, the point of the grrlathlete email was that "starvation mode" as defined by most diet people as "a reaction to a caloric decrease that causes your body to slow down its metabolism and actually store more fat WHILE you are dieting", does not exist.


Our argument is based on the fact that your metabolism is largely based on your lean mass. In studies where people are dieting but their lean mass is maintained through resistance training, there is no reduction in metabolic rate.


Secondly, in periods of complete caloric restriction, LPL and HSL activity (the enzymes that regulate the movement of fat in your body) change to encourage the movement of fat out of your fat stores into your blood and to your muscles where they can be burnt for fuel. If you body was actually storing fat, this enzyme activity would need to be reversed, and this just doesn't seem to happen.


So far I think Tom would agree with our points, they definitely make logical sense and are backed by a considerable number of scientific studies.


In fact, I think his post points out one of the major problems that we have with "starvation mode" - that it lacks a solid definition.


For instance, Tom states out that there is a large amount of research that points out that in studies where lean body mass is reduced considerably, not only is metabolic rate lowered, but it is lower than would be expected by the loss in lean body mass alone.


I have no problems with this statement. When someone loses considerable amounts of lean mass there are many metabolic ramifications of this loss, including many hormonal changes. Again, this is a result of the loss of lean mass, and not the caloric restriction per say. So again, his point is the same as our point - caloric restriction doesn't slow down metabolism, but loss in lean body mass does and a loss in lean mass can have a snowball effect on lowering your metabolism.


The most troubling part of Tom's post was the reference to the Minnesota Experiment, a very old study conducted in the 1940's that studied the effect of 6 months of starvation on healthy male subjects. Now there are a lot of issues with this experiment that I'm positive Tom nor any other fitness expert would agree with.


For instance, The men in the trial started off already very skinny - 5'10" and about 150 pounds was the average. This would correspond to a BMI of under 21. I'm sure if someone with these same measurements came to Tom for advice he would tell them to start weight training and put on some muscle.


But instead of starting a solid weight training program, they reduce their calories down to as low as 1500 Calories for 6 months.

Not only this but they also had to walk 22 miles a week! that's over 3 miles a day of long slow boring cardio...the equivalent of walking on a treadmill for an hour every day...something that goes directly against the muscle preserving advice of Fitness Experts Like Craig Ballantyne, John Barban and Tom Venuto.


Now, getting back to starvation mode. The point of the original email was that caloric restriction does not cause a decrease in metabolic rate, but rather that a loss of muscle mass is what causes metabolic rate to slow down.


So did the people in the Minnesota experiment lose muscle...well, based on these pictures, I'd say yes!



Before and after pics of a subject from the Minnesota Experiment. Two things to notice 1) This subject was VERY skinny to begin with 2) This subject obviously lost muscle mass over the course of the study.




The bottom line is that the Minnesota Experiment did not control for changes in lean mass, nor did many of the other early studies on caloric restriction. This is why many early nutrition studies say that caloric restriction causes a reduction in metabolic rate, and why these studies are confounded.


Lastly, Tom points out that contrary to what was stated in the grrlAthlete email, Starvation mode is actually a scientific term that describes starvation induced increases in "food seeking behavior". Again, you can see the problem with starvation mode and its very vague definition.


If this is the official definition of starvation mode, than it may very well exist in this regard, but this is VERY different from the "starvation mode" as defined in the typical diet literature of "caloric restriction causing a decreased metabolic rate and increased fat storage".

The take home point here is that I stand by the statement that caloric restriction does not cause a decreased metabolic rate and increased fat storage. It is a decrease in lean mass that causes these effects, and this decrease in lean mass can be prevented by a proper weight training program.

Hope this helps,

BP



PS- With regards to the question, "who is right?" I am hoping this post helps clarify that in a way, we are both right, and under that same pretense its important for me to say that I do not believe that my Eat Stop Eat is the only road to weight loss.


I believe that short term periods of fasting for weight loss are an incredibly effective and easy method, but it is by no means the only method. I'm sure that Tom Venuto's program "Burn the fat" and other program like John Berardi's "Precision Nutrition" are also very effective. Different but effective.


At the end of the day the key is finding a program you can stay on long term, because finding the right diet that works for YOU and combining it with a solid resistance training program is the key to succesful, long term weight loss.