“The reduction of energy intake continues to be the basis of…weight reduction programs…[The results] are known to be poor and not long-lasting.” – George Bray, Pennington Biomedical Research Center

As we touched on last week, eating less does not create the need to burn body fat. It creates the need for the body to slow down. Contrary to popular opinion, the body hangs on to body fat. Instead, it burns muscle tissue, and that worsens the metabolic issue causing weight gain. Only as a last resort, if the body has no other option, it may also burn a bit of body fat.

Why does the body hang on to body fat and burn muscle? To answer that question, let’s look at it another way. What does our body want more of when it thinks we are starving? Stored energy. What is a great source of stored energy? Body fat. So when our body thinks we are starving, does it want to get rid of or hold on to body fat? It wants to hold on.

Next, what does our body want less of when we are starving? It wants less tissue which burns a lot of calories. What type of tissue burns a lot of calories? Muscle tissue. So when our body thinks we are starving, it gets rid of calorie-hungry muscle tissue. Studies show that up to 70% of the weight lost while eating less comes from burning muscle—not body fat.

Burning all this muscle means that starving ourselves leads to more body fat—not less—over the long term. As soon as we stop starving ourselves, we have all the calories we used to have but need less of them, thanks to all that missing muscle and our slowed-down metabolism. Now our body sees eating a normal amount as overeating and creates new body fat.

“It is only the rate of weight regain, not the fact of weight regain, that appears open to debate.” – D.M. Garner, Michigan State University

In the Journal of the American Medical Association, researcher G.L. Thorpe tells us that eating less does not make us lose weight, “…by selective reduction of adipose deposits [body fat], but by wasting of all body tissues…therefore, any success obtained must be maintained by chronic under-nourishment.” It is not practical or healthy to keep ourselves “chronically under-nourished,” so we don’t. Instead, we yo-yo diet. That is why eating less of a traditional diet is not an effective long-term fat loss approach. And that is why eating more–but smarter–is an effective long-term fat loss approach.

 

In previous posts we reviewed research showing that eating less of a traditional diet and doing more traditional exercise does not effectively burn fat. Rather, it is effective at causing our metabolism to slow down and our muscles to be burned. In this post we’ll explore a study done at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, which shows that this “slow down, burn muscle, then burn fat” dynamic is intensified in heavy individuals.

In the study, researchers examined both heavy and thin people to see how their metabolisms behaved when they were given no calories. As expected, everyone slowed down. Because these people were on zero-calorie diets, everyone also burned some body fat, but here’s the kicker. Thin people burned off nearly 50% more body fat than heavy people.

Think about that for a second. Despite having more body fat, the heavy people burned less body fat. In the words of the researchers:

“…obese patients could not take advantage of their most abundant fat fuel sources but have to depend on the efficient use of…the breakdown products of body protein [muscle].”

That finding is depressing. The heavy people burned what relatively little muscle they had rather than burning the excess body fat they were drowning in. They needed to burn body fat, but did not burn body fat effectively.

But why?

Creating the need to burn body fat isn’t enough to burn body fat effectively. Our body must also have the ability to burn fat. The requirement for both the need and the ability to burn body fat is a very important point to understand, because at the root of chronic weight gain is our body’s inability to burn body fat effectively. This is why research J.M. Friedman at the Rockefeller University noted that there is “something metabolically different about [overweight] individuals results in obesity independent of their caloric intake.” He is referring to their inability to effectively burn fat despite how little they eat and how much they exercise.

In SANE I call the inability to burn fat a “clog” in our metabolism. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School call it “metabolic dysregulation.” And whether we call it being clogged or experiencing metabolic dysregulation, science shows that until we restore our ability to burn body fat, eating less of our existing diet and doing more of our existing exercise routine will primarily slow us down and burn muscle. Fiddling with the quantity of calories in or out does not create the ability to burn body fat. To do that we need to shift our focus to eating more—but higher-quality—food and doing less—but higher-quality—exercise.

Eating more high-quality food provides more nutrition while preventing overeating. This creates the need to burn body fat. Add less, but higher-quality exercise, and we activate clog-clearing hormones which restore our ability to burn body. And since we will eat as much high-quality food as we want while doing only ten to twenty minutes of high-quality exercise per week, we can keep this up permanently. That permanent need and ability to burn body fat is our proven path to long-term fat loss.

Despite being proven wrong, eating less and exercising more is still the most common approach to weight loss. We are led to believe that our body sits back while we consciously regulate our weight. That is not how our body works. After W.C. Miller of Indiana University ran a clinical test of this principle, he concluded: “This study examined the relationships among body fat…energy intake, and exercise…There was norelationship between energy intake [calories in] and adiposity [body fat]”

Think about any other system in our body—our respiratory system, our immune system, etc. We do not manually control our bodily systems. We can try to hold our breath. We can try to avoid colds. But the respiratory and immune systems are in control and will do what they want. Our “fat metabolism system” works the same way. Researcher J.M. Friedman from the Rockefeller University explains, “The average human consumes one million…calories a year, yet weight changes very little…These facts lead to the conclusion that energy balance is regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5%, which far exceeds what can be consciously monitored.”

• The Fat Metabolism System: A series of signals from our hormones and brain which control how much we eat, how many calories we burn, and how much body fat we store. Researcher P.J. Havel from the University of California defines it more academically:“…a variety of nutrient, endocrine [hormonal], and neural [brain] signals…[regulating] food intake, energy expenditure, and body fat stores.”

When you think about how hard our body systems work to make sure we stay on an even keel health-wise, this point makes perfect sense. Yet here is what the American Heart Association advises: “How can you manage your weight in a healthful way? The answer is simple: balance the calories you take in with the calories you burn.” Which seems odd considering they also said: “Few reliable data are available on the relative contributions to this obesity epidemic by energy intake and energy expenditure.” I might be missing something, but if “few reliable data are available,” then how did they come up with this answer?

We don’t have to worry about beating our hearts thanks to our circulatory system, and we also don’t have to worry about balancing our calories thanks to our fat metabolism system. The key to long-term fat loss and health in general is keeping all of our body’s systems functioning properly by eating more high-quality food, and doing less, but higher-quality, exercise. In the case of our fat metabolism system, this lowers our “set-point” weight and keeps us slim as reliably as our elevated set-point currently keeps us heavy.

In the next post we’ll start to explore the science of our set-point weight…and how we can lower it.