Why You Weigh What You Weigh And What To Do If You Don’t Like It
The holidays are here. We’re entering the season of baked goods, cocktails, and comfort foods. We meet friends at cozy coffee shops and sip seasonal lattes, then go home to snuggle up on the couch. Winter weight gain is real.
Although seasonal weight gain varies from person to person, there have been surveys that show an average of a five to seven pound gain in weight in winter.
-Lawrence J. Cheskin, MD, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore
Five to seven pounds just for surviving the winter! And, as if weight gain alone weren’t enough, along with it comes inflammation, the driver of chronic disease. So, this seems like the perfect time to talk about weight so that we can prepare for this holiday season armed with more understanding. Before diving into this any further, I want to make it VERY clear that, if you struggle to lose weight or to maintain a healthy weight, it isn’t likely that it’s because you’re just eating too much. In fact, studies have shown that overweight people typically eat the same or fewer calories compared to their healthy-weight peers. It’s not simply a matter of calories-in-calories out.
The common advice that to lose weight, you just eat less and exercise more is quite simply wrong. I won’t go so far as to say that calories don’t matter – they do. If you consistently take in more energy than you burn, you will gain weight. That’s very different, though, from saying the solution to losing that weight is eating less, and moving more.
What Controls Our Weight?
What really controls our weight? Our brain. But, not a conscious part of it. Our brain decides what our weight ‘should’ be. It has a set point and it works hard to defend it. There are two systems speaking directly to the brain here – the homeostatic system and the hedonic system.
Homeostatic System: how it works to keep our weight the same, regardless of whether that’s a healthy place to be.
Our brain wants us to maintain homeostasis – our ancestors needed just the right amount of fat both to survive during famine and to thrive when they could hunt and gather. They could be neither too thin nor too fat. Today, if you go on a diet and lose 10 pounds, your homeostatic system is going to report back to your brain with an alert – you’ve gone below your set point and need to gain some weight. You’ll feel hungrier, you’ll decrease your resting energy expenditure so that you burn fewer calories throughout the day, you’ll extract more calories from the food you eat, and so on until you get back to that set point. We see this working to our benefit in lean people – they aren’t typically counting calories or calculating energy expenditure, they’re simply maintaining their weight by living their lives because their brains have established a lean set point. So this isn’t a conscious thing, it’s built into our genes and controlled subconsciously by our brains. But, how does our set point go up in the first place?
Leptin: what makes us feel full and stop eating?
Leptin has been called the satiety hormone and the master fat hormone. It tells the brain how much energy we have stored as fat. It feeds into the homeostatic system we just discussed – if we overeat, it will signal to the brain to eat less food and to burn more energy. If we undereat, it will signal to the brain to eat more and to burn less energy. The system can break down though and it’s a lot like insulin resistance, which most of us have heard of. Insulin resistance is diabetes – our cells no longer respond to insulin so our body (specifically, our pancreas) makes more and more of it. Well, guess what makes leptin, our satiety hormone? Our fat cells! So, if we become leptin resistant, our body makes more fat! To get the message to our brain that we’re full and at our optimal weight, we need more fat cells to make more leptin. See how this will raise our set point? The only way we know we’re full is to make more fat to send more signals to our brains telling us so. So, this is homeostasis. It’s somewhat under our control initially, but it can be very difficult to fix once the body has created this workaround and, at that point, willpower just isn’t enough – our brain won’t let our bodies starve! So we need to learn how to increase our sensitivity to leptin again so that we can lower our set point.
So what causes this leptin resistance and how do we decrease it? Basically, it’s inflammation (the same thing behind almost every chronic disease). Our inflammatory molecules block the leptin signals. The good news is, one of the biggest causes of inflammation is our modern diet, full of processed foods, added sugar, refined grains, and industrial seed oils. When I say industrial seed oils, I’m talking about all the oils you typically see on a food package – sunflower, safflower, corn, soybean, vegetable, and so on. Always choose traditional oils like olive, avocado, coconut, and, for those who tolerate them well, butter and ghee. Next on the list of culprits is insulin resistance, as it may be another cause of leptin resistance. We can improve insulin resistance by keeping blood sugar low and steady and this, in turn, should improve leptin resistance.
What else leads to inflammation and leptin resistance? Poor gut health, nutrient deficiencies, and plastic food containers.
Gut infections and imbalances are other major causes of chronic inflammation. Some imbalance will be corrected simply by eating a whole food, nutrient dense diet. You can also include pre- and pro-biotics to give your gut health an extra boost. More significant imbalances and gut infections may need additional attention that would warrant one-on-one treatment. And then there are the other environmental factors that can lead to this chronic inflammation, including things like micronutrient deficiencies and endocrine disruptors. Minor micronutrient deficiencies can be addressed through a nutrient-dense diet and a high-quality multivitamin. Endocrine disruptors are prevalent in our everyday lives, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll focus on one closely related to our food - plastic containers. It’s a relatively easy switch to make if you’re storing your food in plastic now and can make a big difference to our overall health. As a side note, a recent study showed that the average American eats up to an entire credit card’s worth of plastic each week! So, get yourself some glass containers, especially if you ever heat your food in its storage container! Even more is leeched from the plastic when it’s heated.
Blood Sugar Regulation: A major contributor to maintaining a healthy weight.
Let’s look at blood sugar. We just listed insulin sensitivity as a cause of leptin resistance and the way to beat that is by keeping our blood sugar low and steady. It’s a pretty simple concept to understand – when we eat sugar, our blood sugar goes up. If it goes way up, as it would with a sugary meal, it will crash. The crash signals to our body that we need more sugar to keep our blood sugar from getting too low. We get hungry, we crave sweets and the cycle continues. We also need to remember that what spikes our blood sugar isn’t JUST sugar. It’s also refined grains and other starchy foods. If we’re already eating whole foods rather than processed foods, we’re already beginning to address this blood sugar roller coaster. But, to really attack the blood sugar roller coaster, focus on meals designed specifically to keep blood sugar from spiking and crashing. We do this with lots of protein, fiber, and fat. This doesn’t mean you should eliminate carbs! That can cause a host of its own issues, but you do want to pay attention to them and not make them the focus of your meals. For example, we can eat fruit for breakfast, but we can’t eat it by itself because that’s going to lead to the spike followed by the crash. Instead, we’re going to make sure we combine it with protein, fiber and fat so that we stay full for hours and don’t experience the blood sugar crash.
Hedonic System: We eat because it tastes so good.
I said before that our brain controls our weight and that it does so through a body weight set-point. The two systems contributing most to this set point are the homeostatic system, which we just went over, and the hedonic system, which we’ll go into now. Hedonic is just a fancy word for ‘pleasure-seeking.’ And we’re hard-wired to do this. It started with our ancestors, who evolved seeking out any and all highly palatable, energy dense foods they could find. They needed them to survive and now they’ve become very difficult to resist because eating them was such an advantage to our ancestors. The problem is, those foods used to be rare. Today, we can walk to Wawa or Mcdonald’s in minutes. Or, better yet, just door-dash it right to our front step. It’s too easy to get these highly palatable foods and we’re evolutionarily programmed not to resist them. Sadly, the big food companies hire scientists whose only job is to understand the hedonic system and create foods to be so rewarding that we can’t resist them. Some of the factors they look at are caloric density, texture, fat, starch, and sugar content. They look at what parts of your brain are stimulated when you eat a particular food. They take the food beyond palatable and make it ultra-rewarding so that we can’t stop eating it. Our ancestors found palatable foods and ate as much as they needed of them. Today, we’re presented with ultra-rewarding foods that our hedonic systems can’t resist and we overeat. We need to reprogram our brains by eliminating these ultra-rewarding foods and replacing them with simply palatable foods. This overrides our hedonic system so that we don’t have to rely on willpower to resist the ultra-rewards. That never works! Keep your food relatively simple, full of protein, fiber, and healthy fats. Simple can still be delicious but will keep our brains focused on what we need rather than allowing the hedonic system to take control.
What Makes a Weight Loss Program Successful?
For a weight loss program to be successful and turn into a weight-maintenance program, it needs to do one thing - to lower the body weight set point. We can’t do this simply by starving ourselves. We need to address the underlying systems that contribute to the higher set-point first. We need to lower the set-point so that the homeostatic system works FOR us and, part of doing that, is by addressing the hedonic system by keeping our foods palatable but not ultra-rewarding.
But there’s one more thing, and it’s just as important – there’s also one thing that almost every diet does wrong and is probably the most common mistake in weight loss - voluntary calorie restriction. Sure, it may work temporarily, but it doesn’t lower the body weight set point, it simply leads to our body compensating for what it perceives as starvation. We talked about this with the homeostatic system – if our body thinks it’s starving, it will adjust so that we conserve all our energy and don’t lose those fat stores! So all those times you chose to be hungry to lose weight were actually signaling your body that you should be conserving energy, burning fewer calories, and eating more.
Take Home Messages
This was a long post so I want to summarize the take-home messages.
Simple willpower can’t override thousands of years of evolution and the eat less, move more approach is a public health disaster. This is NOT your fault.
Keep your foods simple and palatable, but not ultra-rewarding.
Include protein, fiber, and fat in every snack and meal. This keeps your blood sugar level, keeps you feeling full, and lets your brain know you are not starving.
Do not voluntarily restrict calories for the sake of losing weight. You can’t fool your brain that way. Keeping foods simple and including protein, fiber, and fat CAN trick your brain into allowing you to eat fewer calories without switching into starvation mode.
And, finally, for a more in-depth read on all of this, please refer to Stephan Guyenet’s published review. Much of this information was pulled from his journal article.