Episode 040: At the end of January I set myself a challenge. Every day, for a period of 12 weeks, I was going to eat a minimum of 3,200 calories per day. If was had room, I could eat more…and on some days I’d see just how high I could take it. (My highest day turned out to be just under 5,000 calories).
According to online calculators I need 2,800 calories per day to maintain my weight, so eating 3,200 as a minimum meant I would be taking in a lot of extra food. Oh, and just so you know, it wasn’t going to be all “health” food. I was going to eat everything. This included lots of frozen pizzas, ready meals, trips to McDonald’s, KFC and a lot of wine.
This week’s episode of Real Health Radio is all about this over eating experiment, how it affected my weight, my symptoms and what happened once it was over. I then use this as a launch pad to talk about calories in and calories out, what are potential drivers for weight gain (or loss) and the relationship between weight and health.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 40 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode in the show notes at www.seven-health.com/40.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey guys and girls, and welcome to another installment of Real Health Radio. This week’s show is another one where it’s just me going over a particular topic. This one is a personal one, and it’s based on an overeating experiment that I did at the start of this year.
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If I were to ask most people how to lose weight, I bet the response would be, or the one that kept coming up, would be “eat less, move more.” This mantra has been uttered so many times that it’s now just part of our everyday rhetoric. But while I think calories and exercise can contribute to weight loss or weight gain, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as straightforward as it’s made out to be.
I’m someone who has a natural propensity not to put on weight. Sure, there are times when my weight has increased, but the vast majority of times, my weight is pretty steady. It may move up and down, but this is within a band of a couple of kilos, and it rarely moves outside of that band.
For quite a while, I’ve been thinking about this. I tend to think of myself as a big eater, but I started to ask myself, is this really the case? Do I have big days or big meals that stick out in my head, but otherwise my eating is just normally on the lower side? Or do I genuinely eat a lot of food and my weight is just steady?
I’m not someone who tracks his calories. I’ve done it at certain points in the past, but not for along time. So it’s hard for me to quantify exactly how much I ate because I’d never really paid that close attention to it. I’d eat when I was hungry and I’d stop when I was full, at least most of the time. But in terms of actual figures, I couldn’t tell you.
So I decided to challenge myself. Starting on the 25th of January and for a period of 12 weeks, I was going to eat 3,200 calories per day, every day, as a minimum. If I was still hungry, I could eat more, and there were going to be days where I would see just how much I could fit in if I really tried. In the end, the experiment only lasted for 9 weeks instead of 12, and I’m going to explain why that was.
So on today’s show, I want to talk about the experiment and how eating impacted on my weight. I’m then going to use this experiment as a launchpad to talk about weight for the general population rather than just what happened to me. This is a topic that I’m constantly asked about, so I thought it would be a great way of covering this.
As you’ll probably see with starting this show, it’s going to be a long one. I have no idea at this stage how long it will end up being, but there’s a huge amount of ideas and information that I want to get through, so I hope you can stick around for the whole of it, and if you need to listen to this in chunks or in parts, then do so.
00:03:25
A bit of background with the experiment – why did I pick 3,200 calories? I wanted to go for a figure that was well above my requirements (this part I’ll cover in a bit), but I also wanted to be able to keep it up. Most people can have a big day of eating, and there are probably days in my everyday life where I get 4,000 calories or 4,500 calories.
But there is a difference between one big day and then keeping this up consistently. Typically if I’ve had a big day of eating, the next day I’m not so hungry. Or if I’m on holiday, I can eat lots on the first two or three days, but as time goes on, the novelty drops off and so does hunger. While I wanted to challenge myself as part of this experiment, I didn’t want to back myself into a corner where after Week 1 or Week 2 I just couldn’t keep it up.
For about 7 to 10 days before starting the experiment, I started to track my calories and tried eating lots of food and seeing where my calories would come out and where it felt okay. Some of the days I would hit 3,500 calories, but it was a real stretch, and I didn’t feel that it would be doable over an extended period of time. So I looked at 3,200 calories and the days I’d eaten that, and it felt like it was going to be a real struggle and it was going to be work, but I was confident that I’d be able to do it. The idea was also to set the minimum and to try and go above it. So 3,200 calories became the figure that I was going to aim for.
00:05:00
The calorie tracking app that I used was a product called Tummy, and it’s actually an app that’s been created by a past client of mine. I was never and have never really been happy with the online trackers – things like MyFitnessPal, Cronometer. I’d just never been happy with them, so I’d reverted back to using an Excel spreadsheet with clients. But with Tummy, it allows me to do everything I want with the tracking software plus lots of other things apart from just counting calories.
When starting the experiment, the Tummy app was still in development, so it was perfect for me to be able to test this out thoroughly. It felt like I was killing two birds with one stone.
For those who are interested, I have recorded everything I ate for the whole experiment, but again, this is going to be something I’m going to come back to because things with calories aren’t as straightforward as they may seem.
00:05:55
In terms of exercise as part of the experiment, I was going to be doing what I normally do. Really, it was just the eating side of things that I was changing, but every other part of my life I wanted to stay the same.
My normal exercise routine is walking the dog every day, and this is between 1-2 hours. I also do a 1-hour circuits class, and this happens between one and three times a week, but probably averages out at about one and a half times a week. I did keep track of all of this stuff.
I had a half marathon trail run that was then booked in for April time, so I started doing some training for this probably about halfway through the experiment. Training consisted of me going for a run. It was normally only on a Saturday, and it only happened on a handful of occasions. It would range anywhere from about 10k to I did do a couple of half marathons in training.
I also played golf, but considering the timing of the experiment – I started on the 25th of January and it was pretty much the dead of winter for a lot of the time, and where I lived it was very wet and muddy this winter – golf didn’t happen very much. So really, the first half of the experiment and even during the second half of the experiment, there was probably only a handful of rounds that I played the whole time throughout it.
I got a new iPhone just before starting the experiment which would record all of my steps each day, which included all my walking, my running, and any time I played golf. As an idea, just to give you a ballpark, I averaged just shy of 9 kilometers a day. This is for the whole of the year, and this is probably slightly higher now because the weather is nice out and I’m playing a lot more golf recently. But if we’re going back to when the experiment ended, it was about 8 kilometers per day.
For those who think in miles, 8 to 9 kilometers is roughly 5 to 5.5 miles, and in terms of steps, this is somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 steps.
00:08:10
I wanted to work out what my calorie needs were so I could see how much 3,200 would be exceeding this on a daily and a weekly basis. Now, there’s quite detailed ways of doing this stuff in laboratories that can work out your exact amount of BMR and other factors that would really determine your calorie demands.
But most people who are interested in weight loss or working out their calories don’t do any of this. They go online, they put in some height and weight measures, and they see what the site spits out. I therefore wanted to do it this way because this is what nearly everyone else does. I wanted to see how much my figures were at the end of the experiment and how they would then match up with the online information and what had been suggested would happen.
With doing this online, you really have two ways of doing it – and there are obviously countless different websites; I don’t mean that there are just two sites. But what I mean is you can either look at your weekly averages and work it out that way, or you can work it out by looking at the individual days. So seeing my figures for a day where I would play golf versus a day where I’d go to circuits versus a day where I’d do some running versus a day I would do no exercise apart from walking the dog, and then based on all of these days, work out how much those happen each week and then work it out that way.
The first way is where it looks at the weekly averages, and this is really the most standard. This is the way that most people do it. This is the way it’s done in most calorie tracking apps as well. You go to a site; it asks for your weight, your height, your age, your gender, and then asks for your level of activity across a week. It normally has a dropdown of about five or six different options.
Some calculators also break down this question about exercise, looking at the physical demands of your job and then the physical demands outside of work.
I did this calculation on a number of different sites, and the numbers typically would average between 2,650 and 2,750 as my daily calorie needs. Some sites were as low as 2,300 and one site was as high as 2,937. If I was to take the average of all of these sites, it roughly works out at 2,700, which is what these sites estimate I need to maintain my weight, and if I continue to eat 2,700 calories a day, my weight would stay the same.
The other way of calculating it is looking at each of the days with different demands and working out what’s needed on each of them. Obviously this is only a rough guess, because some days I would walk the dog for slightly longer or slightly shorter or the circuits class would be more demanding or I’d spend more time working on my laptop while I was standing versus times working on my laptop when I was sitting. So while this should be a little more exact, it’s still very much an estimate.
On the days where I didn’t do any exercise except walking the dog, my estimated calorie needs were 3,613. On a day where I’d go and do a circuits class, my estimated calorie needs were 3,095. On a day I played golf, my estimated calorie needs are 3,469 calories. And for a day where I’d go for a run for about an hour and a half, it would be 3,269.
When I do all these separate calculations and then work out what I need, if I average say going to circuits one and a half times a week, it then works out at 2,716 calories per day. If I go to circuits once a week and then go for a run once, my daily calorie needs would average out at 2,775. If I go to circuits once a week, then play golf once a week, my daily calorie needs when averaged over a week are 2,804.
So even with all of this extra work with the calories figures, they come out about the same, and that is that the estimate is I need somewhere between 2,700 and 2,800 to maintain my weight given my daily activity. For the experiment, I went with the slightly higher number and assumed that on average, I’d need 2,800 calories each day despite the fact that I was aiming to eat 3,200 calories or above.
So with all of this explanation and groundwork, let’s get started with how I got on.
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On Monday the 25th of January, the first day of the experiment, I weighed 64.5 kilos or 142 pounds. This was first thing in the morning, straight after waking, before I’d had anything to eat, which is how I weighed myself the whole time throughout the experiment – which I did basically every day, barring a couple of times where I forgot or I was away.
As I mentioned earlier, for the 7 to 10 days prior to starting the experiment, I was playing around with different calorie figures and was on some days eating a real lot of food. Realizing what was ahead of me, for the last couple of days before I started, I really cut back my calories. I wasn’t actively restricting, but I was intentionally having very light meals to try and build up some hunger before I started the experiment.
For the preceding week before starting, my weight was normally between about 65 and 65.7 kilos, which is 143 to 145 pounds, but only dropped down in those last couple of days because of my intentional undereating to then get to that point of 64.5 kilos or 142 pounds on Day 1 of starting.
Rather than going through week by week of everything that happened with the experiment, I’m going to cover it by looking at things I noticed throughout the whole experiment.
00:14:30
To start with, I was eating mostly homecooked food, with the majority being fruits and vegetables and meat and fish and rice – basically, the way that I normally eat, but just higher amounts of food coming in. But eating this kind of food can be quite filling in comparison to the amount of calories that I would really need, so I started eating more chocolate to help get up the calories, or I’d have – there’s a brand called Gü, and they do different puddings and desserts, so I started having them pretty much on a daily basis.
But as the experiment went on, the kinds of foods started to shift, and I was waking up feeling absolutely stuffed, and every day became a real struggle to get the necessary foods in. Things like above-ground vegetables – broccoli, courgettes, that kind of thing – they really started to disappear from my diet as they would take up too much room from a bulk perspective and just give me so little calories in comparison to what I needed.
As it went on, more and more of my food shifted towards processed foods, or at least ready-meals that were more palatable and calorie-dense. I started having more frozen pizzas. I started eating more ready-meals. There’s a line of ready-meals called Charlie Bigham that Waitrose does that are delicious. They come in a meal that’s meant to be for two people, but I had the whole thing to myself. If I had that and then I maybe had a dessert and maybe had some wine with it, I could be hitting 1,500, 1,600, 1,700 calories in one meal.
My eating strategy also changed as I went through. Initially, I started out having three main meals each day and then a number of snacks, so I’d have a mid-morning snack and a mid-afternoon snack and then a snack before bed. This worked okay for a while, but then I just couldn’t stomach eating so often when I was so full all the time.
So I changed to having three meals a day and maybe some chocolate or some desserts at some points throughout the day. I tried to leave these really long gaps between my meals to just get any semblance of hunger, and then I would start to eat.
Toward the end I started trying to have three meals a day, but I’d have one meal that was just huge so I could then be hitting 1,400 or 1,600 or 1,800 calories in one meal, and it would then take the pressure off for the rest of the other meals and I could hopefully get there.
In terms of macronutrients breakdown, this also shifted a bit throughout the experiment. I normally eat a lot of carbohydrates. This probably accounts for 45-50% of my calories – and obviously this is a bit of guess, because before the experiment I wasn’t tracking. But carbohydrates make up a large percentage of what I eat. But as the experiment went on, this percentage dropped from around that 45-50% range down to about 35-45% carbohydrates depending on the day.
But for me to increase my calories, it was just so much easier for me to up my fat percentage. This was normally through added fats. So for my eggs in the morning, I would add a huge chunk of butter, or when I was having white rice, I would add lots of butter or lots of olive oil. So I became very liberal with my fat usage.
In the whole scheme of things, my fat percentage was probably pretty low in some people’s books. I see certain proponents talking about making fat 50% or 60% of your calories, and I got nowhere near that amount. But I’m normally probably around 25-30% for fat, and this then shifted up to somewhere between 30-40% as part of the experiment depending on the days.
My protein was pretty low a lot of the time and would be coming out normally between 15-20% of my calories. And when I say low, this is relatively speaking. For me, to hit 15-20% of my calories when I was eating 3,200 calories or 3,600 calories, it still works out at 120 to 180 grams of protein each day. So it is a high amount, but it was just lower in terms of percentage.
I was really conscious when I started this experiment that I wanted to have a real mix of things. I didn’t want people to be able to say that my results were because I was high carb or low carb or high fat or low fat or because I was eating whole foods. I really wanted to eat the whole gamut of foods as part of the experiment, and I really did.
On the second last day of the experiment, I went out for breakfast at a nice café and had some French toast with some banana and some bacon and tons of maple syrup. For lunch, I then went and had KFC, and then for dinner, I went and had McDonald’s. On that day I ate 3,800 calories. So really, no one can accuse me of only eating healthy foods. And these kinds of meals weren’t just occasional exceptions, but accounted for a fair amount of what I ate, especially towards the end of the experiment.
I also started having alcohol a lot more in my life to up my calories. I’m not normally a big drinker, although I do like going out for a drink, and if I go into London to meet up with friends I’ll definitely have a drink and probably have a lot to drink – but as the experiment went on, I was having a glass of wine most nights because if I had a big glass of wine with my dinner, I could get in an extra 200 calories for that glass.
There were a couple of nights or a couple of days that were very boozy in my attempt to really get my calories up. For one day, I hit just over 4,500 calories, and 1,000 of those calories came from me having 5 pints of beer. On another day I was just shy of 4,900 calories, and 1,400 calories were due to having a bottle of wine and then lots of beers.
There is a lot of research to show how liquid calories aren’t registered in the body the same way as these calories are if they came in food form. Part of the issue with people drinking soda or fizzy drinks is this fact. Much more than the sugar and the additives or anything along those lines is that people who drink them tend to increase their calorie intake without noticing any difference in their fullness levels.
Despite this, I really didn’t drink fizzy drinks that much. I rarely drink them in my everyday life and just didn’t think to be adding them in as part of this experiment.
I did definitely up my water intake, though. Eating so much food just made me much thirstier and increased my body’s need for water. It took me a while to realize this and that I needed to up things. I would be getting to the afternoon time and have very dark urine in the afternoon and the evening. So I slowly started to up my water, and that would then prevent it.
One thing I do want to stress is just how hard this really was. You may be listening to this and thinking, “Wow, this sounds amazing. He got to eat all this food, he got to do all this drinking” and that you would love to be able to do it. Maybe you would like to do it for a couple of days, but as time goes on, the novelty really wears off. Constantly feeling full and then knowing it’s, say, 5:00 at night and you still need to get in another 1,600 calories, it really starts to suck.
If you just forget about the calories figure for a minute – because there’s probably people who think 3,200 calories is a huge amount, and there’s probably other people who think “that’s actually not that much food, that’s what I eat every day and I feel fine doing it” – for the experiment, I ate significantly more than I ever have in my life and kept it up consistently. I was eating to the point of not being able to eat another mouthful and doing this meal after meal, day after day.
00:22:45
I actually reached this really strange point of being hungry but full at the same time. I wouldn’t have eaten for say – I’d have my breakfast, and I wouldn’t have eaten something for 6 or 7 hours, and there would be this strange sensation of a little bit of hunger, but at the same time, food would still be sitting really heavy, and I’d have this overwhelming feeling of fullness.
I remember years ago, when I did my first detox – and it’s not something I do anymore, but it was one of my first forays into getting into health, and the detox was for 4 weeks. As part of it, you could eat as much as you wanted; you just weren’t allowed to eat certain foods or ingredients. It was a vegan detox, but you also weren’t allowed to be adding much oil with your cooking, no sugar, no salt, and there was other stuff you weren’t allowed as well. It was mostly fruits and vegetables and beans and pulses and brown rice and that kind of thing.
At this stage, when I first did this, I was coming from a diet that was very high in fast food, and up to that point I’d typically never thought about what I was eating ever before, and it was a real shock. I remember as part of this detox, getting this sensation where I would be full from a meal, but at the same time I was not getting or I hadn’t got any satisfaction from it. So I’d be full, but there’d be no enjoyment from the meal.
While the detox was very different from this overeating experiment, there was definitely a similarity in that sensation, where there would be this fullness and hungry at the same time, albeit coming from totally different reasons.
While the eating experiment was initially meant to last for 12 weeks, in the end I could only manage to do it for 9. It was about 2 weeks in when I realized how much it was really tough, so I decided to shift it from being 12 weeks to 10 weeks. But then towards the end of the eighth week, I was just really broken. I knew I just couldn’t keep it up for another 2 weeks, so I decided to make it 9 weeks at that stage.
00:24:55
In terms of changes in symptoms over the experiment, apart from the fullness that I noticed, there wasn’t huge changes. I’m normally someone who’s a pretty healthy guy; I feel fairly good, so I don’t have a lot of issues going on.
The fullness really was an issue, and after the first or second week, I actually started taking digestive enzymes and HCl tablets. It was typically worse in the morning time. I’d finish breakfast and I’d be out walking the dog, and I had this really strong sense of nausea, even to the point where I actually thought I was going to be sick a number of times. The tablets would help a little bit with this, but I think they had a pretty uphill battle considering how much I was eating and how much I was working against my body and just continuing to eat despite it telling me not to.
I was much warmer while doing the experiment, and I’m a pretty warm guy anyway. I wasn’t taking my body temperature, but I was wearing less clothes. The kitchen in my house is normally pretty cold, which is lovely in the summertime but not so much in the wintertime. But even in the middle of winter when I was doing this experiment, I was fine in that I’d be doing my cooking in the kitchen and I’d be bare feet and I’d be on the cold tile floor, and I was really enjoying the cooling sensation from it.
My sleep throughout the experiment wasn’t as good as it normally is, but I did have some other stuff going on outside of all the eating, so it’s hard for me to say if it was the food or for other reasons. My sleep was just a little broken, which is something that doesn’t normally happen. There were definitely nights, though, where I would go to bed and it would take me a long while to get to sleep, and that was because I was so full and feeling so uncomfortable.
Stools-wise, things were probably a little looser than they are normally. While in some sense I felt like food was sitting heavy and it was moving very slowly and I was all blocked up, in other ways it felt like my transit time really increased and the body was just trying to get things moving and get things out of the body. My frequency of passing stool also increased. I was going three, four, five times a day.
My mood probably wasn’t as good throughout the experiment, purely because of the fullness and the knowledge that despite my fullness, I was having to eat again shortly. There would be days where I would be hungry and things were fine and mood was okay, but there’d be other days where I’d be so full and it was really tough. My girlfriend actually commented at some point of how much she was looking forward to it being over so I’d be able to stop complaining about the fact that I was so full every time I’d sit down for a meal. I definitely had feelings of being irritated or annoyed or just resenting the fact that I had to keep doing it. But this wasn’t all the time.
But really, considering what I was putting my body through, I was surprised at how little changes I really felt on the symptom front.
00:28:05
Keeping a log of everything I ate was interesting. One of the things that really surprised me was how easy it was to forget what I had eaten. I tried to do things as I go, so I’d be updating meals as soon as I was having them and snacks as soon as I was having them, but some days I’d be really busy with clients and I’d be keeping up the eating side, but then I’d be inputting the meals later on.
I could then be sitting there after, doing that, and be totally stumped about what I’d had as a snack in the morning. Despite the fact that it was only hours earlier, I really struggled to remember. I know there’s a lot of research studies where people have to keep food diaries or remember what they ate to explain it to researchers, and people always question over the validity and how accurate this stuff is.
I can totally understand this. Despite me making a huge effort and a huge focus on actively marking down everything I ate, I would still find myself in this position of forgetting things. Then the likelihood of asking someone how often they ate a certain food over the last two weeks or over the last month and they’re trying to do this stuff from memory, chances are that these memories are going to be wrong, and often quite significantly so.
Normally with enough thinking, I was able to remember what I had. There were a couple of occasions where I just totally blanked on it. I couldn’t remember it, so I would put on the log that I had “a snack,” I can’t remember it, and I just didn’t put any calories figures in for whatever that snack was.
00:29:45
As I mentioned, my goal was to hit 3,200 calories a day as a minimum. Despite this goal, it didn’t happen every day. Normally there would be one day a week where I would be under this figure. Towards the end of the experiment, there were some weeks where I would be under on two days.
Sometimes, especially in the beginning time, it was because I didn’t calculate my last meal on the app before going to bed. I thought my last meal had been bigger than it was, and then I’d wake up the next morning, input it, and discover that I was under. As the experiment went on, the days where I was below was because I was just so full that I couldn’t eat anymore.
But I would add that I was regularly above the 3,200 figure. Sometimes it would be a little bit, so it would be 3,300. Other days it was like 3,500, 3,600, and other days I was significantly over where I was above 4,000 calories or I’d be close to 5,000 calories. When I work out the average across the whole experiment, my daily calorie average was 3,347 calories, so just shy of 150 calories extra on top of what my original target was.
This meant that throughout the experiment over those 9 weeks, I consumed 210,846 calories. If we were to go back to the original calculations that I talked about and say that I needed 2,800 calories per day, this means that it would work out that over that 9 week period, I’d need 176,400 calories. The fact that I’d eaten 210,846 calories means that over that 9 week period, I consumed an extra 34,446 calories on top of what online calculators said I need.
The figure that is always talked about is that 1 pound of body fat is equivalent to 3,500 extra calories. If you eat an extra 3,500 calories, you should put on a pound. If you avoid 3,500 calories, so eat under 3,500 calories of what your body needs, you should lose a pound. That means that 3,446 extra calories would lead to an extra 9.85 pounds, or just shy of 4.5 kilos for what my body should have put on over that time.
The math on this is slightly flawed because as extra weight goes on, the body now needs a higher amount of calories to maintain that new weight. I haven’t found a good online calculator that lets me reverse engineer this figure based on how much I ate over this period, but my best guess would be that rather than a figure of 9.85 pounds or 4.5 kilos, it would probably be somewhere around 7 pounds or 3.5 kilos. This could be way off and I could be really bad with my math on doing this. It’s just based on what I can try and work out from online resources. So if there’s anyone out there who can tell me a better way of working it out, then please get in contact. I’m happy to hear it.
00:33:10
With this in mind, then, let’s look at what happened with my weight and match this up with the extra calories each week. As I mentioned earlier, on the morning of the first day of the experiment, I was sitting at 64.5 kilos or 142.2 pounds. At the end of Week 1 – this is actually the Monday morning of Week 2 – I was sitting at 65 kilos or 143.3 pounds. So I had put on half a kilo, or 1.1 pounds, over that week.
If we’re using the 2,800 calories of the daily baseline of what I needed, during that first week of the experiment, I ate an extra 4,286 calories. If 3,500 calories is meant to lead to a 1 pound increase, in my case it took 4,286 calories for a 1.1 pound increase.
Then at the end of Week 2, my weight was now 65.7 kilos or just shy of 144.8 pounds. So I had increased by 0.7 of a kilo or 1.5 pounds. During this week I ate an extra 3,835 calories over what is estimated I needed. Hence the weight increase.
But Week 3, there was an interesting thing. Despite the fact that during Week 3 I ate an extra 3,928 calories above what I needed, my weight actually came down. I finished Week 3 weighing 65.5 kilos or 144.4 pounds, so I lost 0.2 of a kilo or 0.4 of a pound despite all of the extra eating.
Week 4 went back to what you would expect and my weight went up again. I finished the end of Week 4 weighing 66.1 kilos or 145.7 pounds. This is an increase of 0.6 kilos or 1.1 pounds, and during this week I ate an extra 4,378 calories. So again, if it’s meant to be 3,500 calories to increase an extra pound, for me it called for a lot more than this for this to happen.
Week 5 was my biggest weight gain and also my biggest week of eating. In Week 5 I ate an extra 5,381 calories above what the online calculator estimated I need – and this is keeping in mind that I’m estimating on the higher end of these estimates – and at the end of Week 5 I now weighed 66.9 kilos or 147.4 pounds. So this week was an increase of 0.8 of a kilo or 1.9 pounds, so just shy of 2 pounds over that week.
Week 6 was where I reached my highest weight, albeit only marginally more than the week before. I finished Week 6 at 67 kilos or 147.7 pounds, and despite eating an extra 3,959 calories this week, I put on only an extra 0.1 of a kilo or 0.2 of a pound.
But from Week 7 onwards, despite continuing to eat significantly more than what I need and eating to the point of basically feeling ill most of the time, my weight began to drop down. So at the end of Week 7, my weight was now 66.2 kilos or 145.9 pounds. Despite the fact that this week I ate an extra 3,934 calories on top of what I needed, I actually lost 0.8 of a kilo or 1.1 pounds. So I lost just shy of 2 pounds during that week despite all the extra eating.
The last two weeks I was really struggling to keep my calories up. It was much more erratic with my eating. There would be days where I’d only manage 2,300 calories because I was just so full, although the days prior to the 2,300 calories – for two days I’d eaten 3,800 and 3,800. I knew I was getting to the end and I was just trying to do my best to keep the experiment going.
At the end of Week 8, my weight was 66.1 kilos or 145.7 pounds. So I dropped a tiny amount, coming down 0.1 of a kilo or 0.2 of a pound, and during this week I was 2,709 calories above my calorie needs. Really nowhere near the heady heights of 5,381 calories, which I’d done in Week 5, but it was still a lot of food.
Then at the end of Week 9, and also at the end of the whole overeating part of this experiment, my weight had then come down further. I finished on the final Monday weighing 65.7 kilos, or 144.8 pounds, so a further drop of 0.4 of a kilo or 0.9 of a pound for that last week. During this week I ate an extra 2,586 calories above what it’s estimated I needed, so this was the lowest amount of calories of all the weeks.
After 9 weeks of eating as much as I possibly could, I ended the experiment only 1.2 kilos or 2.6 pounds heavier than where I started. For me, eating an extra 34,446 calories above what I apparently need only led to 1.2 kilos or 2.6 pounds of an increase in my weight.
00:39:15
I can’t tell you how pleased I was when it was over. For the last couple of weeks prior to the experiment ending, I’d actually started to fantasize about doing a fast, and I’ve never done a fast before in my life. I never had had any real desire to do one, but after being so full for so long, it felt like it was the perfect thing to do.
It kind of reminded me of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was a famous experiment down back in 1944-1945. It’s a really fascinating experiment. I’m going to do a whole podcast show dedicated to it. But if you’ve never heard of it, as I said, done in Minnesota between ’44 and ’45. They took 36 men who were then put on a restricted diet for 24 weeks. They were studied to see what happened to them physically, mentally, and emotionally in response to starvation.
Many of the participants – pretty much all the participants – started to dream about becoming chefs and becoming restaurant owners and dreaming about food. They would spend all their time reading cookbooks. They’d be staying up till 5:00 in the morning, flipping through different cookbooks and recipe books and basically anything they could get their hands on that related to food, to stuff about agriculture. Because of this level of starvation, their interest in food drastically increased.
For me, because I had been full for so long, I had a similar fantasy, but for me, it wasn’t about eating. It was about doing a fast.
For the first couple of days after the experiment, my eating was pretty light. I had more salads, I had more above-ground vegetables and all of the low-calorie whole foods that I’d been avoiding because they just weren’t calorie-dense enough. I didn’t actually do a fast, but I would say for the first handful of days, I didn’t eat very much at all.
It actually took a little while for my hunger gauge to come back properly. As I mentioned earlier, I had this really weird feeling of being hungry and full at the same time. Now that I didn’t need to override that sensation to get my calories up, it left me in this limbo land where I just didn’t know what feeling I was really getting. It probably took about 3 weeks or maybe even a little bit longer for this to fully disappear – and that’s after me doing an experiment for only 9 weeks.
So many of the clients that I work with have this same sensation of not being sure if they’re hungry or if they’re full or if they should be eating or whatever, and rather than coming from a place of overeating like I had, it’s coming from a place of restriction that they’ve been doing for so many years. If they have been following diets, if they’ve been restricting for years or even decades, they have this feeling of not really knowing what their body’s telling them.
The complaint in the beginning when I’m starting to get them to focus on their body signals and their intuition is they just have no idea what it’s saying. I totally get this. If I can experience this after doing a short experiment for 9 weeks, then they can sure as hell experience it if they’ve been dieting or restricting for a large percentage of their adult life.
But like I experienced, it does go away. Probably for these clients, it’s not in 2 weeks, because it’s been going on for so long for these people. But the more people start to eat and listen to their body and feed themselves correctly, it does change and they can get back to a place of listening to their hunger signals and the hunger signals being correct.
I was pretty surprised at how the process started to affect my body image and my thoughts about weight. This was more of an issue once the experiment was over rather than when I was doing the overeating. The week after I stopped doing the experiment, my weight started to come down – which is really no surprise. But what was strange was after about 3 or 4 days of decreasing, it actually started to go up again despite eating really tiny amounts in comparison to what I was doing before.
After 5 days of eating small amounts, I was actually slightly heavier than when I ended the experiment. By the end of the first week after the experiment was over, my weight was down to 65.3 kilos or 144 pounds, which is only a tiny drop from where I finished the experiment. After the end of Week 2, I was basically at the same place.
While I had no right to feel frustrated, the fact that my weight wasn’t going down really started to annoy me, and getting on the scale each morning became a very unpleasant experience. I’m someone who has really good body image, and I realize that the difference between a couple of kilos on a scale makes absolutely no difference to my health, to my appearance, to really anything, but for some reason this hyper-analyzing of my weight and my eating and everything that had gone on for such a long time meant that when I’d get on the scale and was expecting or possibly hoping for it to get down and it wasn’t, it would really start to affect me.
To remedy this, I just stopped weighing myself on a daily basis. Instead, I would do it once or maybe twice a week. This change really helped. The small amounts of frustration that I was experiencing started to go away. I would add it was probably helped by not just the less focus, but the weight did then start to go down.
Three weeks after the experiment was over, I was at 64.7 kilos or 142.6 pounds. Four weeks after the experiment was over, I was at 64.5 kilos or 142 pounds, which is where I started the experiment. At the time of recording this, we’re 7 weeks on since the experiment was over, and as of this morning, I’m sitting at 63.4 kilos or 139.7 pounds. So I’m now 1.1 kilos or 2.4 pounds lighter than before I started the experiment.
My normal weight range is typically between about 61 and 64 kilos, which is 134 to 140 pounds. By the middle of summertime, when I’m playing a lot of golf and spending more time outdoors and doing gardening and that kind of thing, I probably get to the real lower end of that scale, which is typically what happens for me.
I started the experiment at a higher level than normal, and I want to explain a little about why that happened. Part of the reason for the higher amount was I had a pretty horrible end to 2015. My girlfriend, at the end of last year, was actually pregnant and we were both very excited about becoming parents. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, which was only discovered after her fallopian tube had ruptured and I had to rush her to hospital in excruciating pain, and she needed emergency surgery.
Prior to this event happening, my weight had been sitting around 61-62 kilos. In the space of a number of weeks, this jumped up to being around 64-66 kilos purely from the stress of the situation and how it affected me. I was actually eating a lot less than usual when this was happening, but my sleep was poor and there was a lot of stuff that I needed to be focusing on in terms of my personal life and comforting my girlfriend and comforting myself, etc.
After that happened, I then spent 4 weeks in Australia on holiday with my girlfriend over the Christmas period. As is typical with holidays, especially if I go and see family, it really was a bit of a nonstop eat-a-thon, and we were going out to lovely restaurants and eating lots of decadent food and drinking lots of wine, so my weight then didn’t really come down over that time. So when I started the experiment – which was actually only a couple of weeks after returning from Australia – I was still sitting at that new higher weight level.
00:47:35
With all of this information about the experiment in mind, I want to now look at weight in a more general sense rather than just what happened to me. To start with, I’m under no illusions – I am an anomaly. I know that I’m sitting at the far end of the spectrum when it comes to difficulty putting on weight. Not for a minute am I suggesting that if you do the same thing as part of this experiment, that you’re going to get similar results, because 99 out of 100 people are going to get different results to what I did.
I think someone’s weight and their propensity to put on or lose weight happens on a spectrum, and while I may be at one end of the spectrum, there can equally be people who experience the exact same of what I did in reverse at the other end of the spectrum. They can go on a diet where they cut their calories and do so rather drastically, and they then keep that up for 9 weeks, and despite apparently having this huge calorie deficit, what actually happens in terms of weight that they lose can be a tiny amount in comparison to what some online calculator would estimate would happen.
Just like I had to use an inordinate amount of willpower to keep me eating despite my body’s best effort to get me to stop, they experience something very similar. They are hungry all the time, to the point of it becoming all-consuming. At some point they just can’t take it any longer, like I did, and they return to eating in a way that feels more right for their body.
Within a short space of time, they’re back to where they started weight-wise, and then a couple of weeks after that, they’re now heavier than when they started. Despite putting in a monumental effort doing exactly what people told them to do to lose weight, it doesn’t result in the outcome that they expected.
00:49:35
Part of the reason for this is due to a concept known as the weight set point theory. The weight set point theory is the idea that the body naturally and automatically controls your weight. It suggests that your body has an ideal weight range that it likes to keep you in, and this range can be anywhere from a small couple of pounds or kilos up to say 15 or 20 kilos, which would be 23 to 45 pounds, and this depends on how much someone weighs. It’s normally estimated that it’s roughly 10% of your body weight. Most people can fluctuate up and down within this range, and it happens on a fairly regular basis; however, moving out of this range in either direction becomes much more difficult.
I definitely saw this with my overeating experiment, and it’s not just my experiment. It’s been shown with other experiments that look at starvation and overfeeding. The body will fight to get back to where its ideal weight is. If it’s then provided with what it needs for this to happen, it will do this very naturally.
I don’t think I ever moved outside of my natural range during this experiment. I butted up against the top level and my body then did everything in its power to bring me back down, and now that I’ve returned to the more normal way of eating, my weight is dropping down to the lower end of the range where it normally sits.
Body diversity is a real thing. Even though it’s not what we’re exposed to every day in the media and in advertising and all that, it is a real thing. Just as it’s unrealistic that everyone can be a size 6 or a size 8 in UK terms, or a size 2 or a size 4 in U.S. terms, it’s also unrealistic to think that everyone can get to the point of being 300 or 400 pounds, or 130 or 180 kilos.
A huge majority of people just can’t get anywhere near this higher weight, no matter how much they tried. Even if they’re eating terribly, even if they’re under a huge amount of stress, even if they’re doing everything that they shouldn’t, their weight will go up, but it will max out way before they get anywhere near those numbers.
So while there is a genuine fear from lots of my clients that they will hit this huge or their weight will start to spiral and will just go up and up and up and will never stop, this is just as unrealistic as it is their desire to be a size 4 or a size 6.
I am very conscious of the privilege that I receive in society due to things that I have absolutely no control over and I’ve done nothing to warrant. I’m male, I’m white, I’m middle class, I’m thin. But for now, let’s just look at the thinness side of things.
In my life there are things that I do and that I keep up that probably have some impact on my weight. In my normal life, I do all of my own cooking, or pretty much all of my own cooking, with fresh ingredients. I get regular exercise and movement on a daily basis. I go to bed early and get plenty of sleep. I have good self-care and I manage my stress. I have happy and supportive relationships. I have good self-esteem and feel very autonomous in my life and the decisions I can make. All of these things undoubtedly help with the weight that I weigh.
But the vast majority of why I weigh what I weigh is just dumb luck. This is the way that I am, for better or for worse, and there’s not much that I can do about it.
00:53:15
I often think about this and think what it would be like if I lived in a society where actually, they favored fatness and they valued this instead of leanness, and if the standards for beauty were someone who weighed 300 or 400 pounds. In that society, I would be royally screwed, because the likelihood of me ever getting to that place are slim to none. Imagine how people would then talk about my weight, in the same way as they talk about people’s weight who are heavier now – if I was told I was lazy, I lacked willpower, I obviously didn’t care about my health – how horrible and deflated I would feel about myself.
Maybe I could then start to try and increase my weight by starting to change other things, not just the amount of calories I ate. Maybe I could stop doing so much exercise. Maybe I could start going to bed at later times and messing with my circadian rhythm in an attempt to increase my weight. Maybe I could start eating less fruits and vegetables and eat even more processed food. Maybe I could start having more alcohol or more fizzy drinks.
The problem with this is that even if I did start to put on weight through all of these methods, and in this mythical world that we’re talking about, this is valued and I’m being complimented because of it, my health is now being jeopardized and is starting to suffer. Sure, I may start to put on more weight and I may be able to reach this weight goal and be better from it in some ways from a status perspective, but it’s actually having a much more detrimental effect on my health.
This is what I see happening in our current society: people making changes in their diet and lifestyle that are about losing weight, which in their mind they tell themselves are about getting healthy, but in reality, these changes are pushing them further away from health.
This is why so much of what I do with clients has little to do with weight. Can weight have an impact on someone’s health? Yes, it certainly can. But there are a couple of big parts of this that I think people really need to realize. The first is the point at which weight starts becoming a problem is much higher than most people think.
00:55:35
Using BMI – which is a very flawed system, but let’s use it for this explanation – the healthy category for BMI is 18 to 24, the overweight category is 25 to 29, the obese category is 30 to 39, and the extremely obese category is 40 and upwards.
In most people’s mind, being overweight – so a BMI of 25 and onwards – is where they think the real danger starts. But really, this isn’t the case. BMI only really starts to have a statistical difference once you get to around a BMI of 31 or 32 and upwards. That means that on average, on paper anyway, having a BMI of 23 or having a BMI or 29 basically makes no difference.
Considering that obesity starts at a BMI of 30, even in the early stages of obesity, it has very little impact from a statistical perspective on someone’s health. There’s a great book by Paul Campos called The Obesity Myth which I highly recommend, that looks at a lot of this stuff.
The second point with this is that people’s habits then have a huge impact on their risks, and this is without a change to someone’s weight. Things like how many fruits and vegetables someone eats, what exercise or movement they do, whether they smoke, if they drink moderately – all of these significantly impact on health. When these variables are then taken into account, you can have a situation where someone is lean and someone is obese, and they’re both following healthy habits, and their risk of death and other disease are pretty much the same.
This can be the case even if we’re talking about people who are over that magic number of 31 or 32 BMI, because the thing to remember with all of this is you’re looking at statistics and you’re looking at trends at a population level, but this is very different to what happens for an individual.
For example, let me use a BMI of 35, which is squarely in the obese category. Maybe for a large percentage of people who sit at this weight, they are there because of poor habits. They eat badly, they do little exercise, they smoke and they drink heavily, they get poor sleep. Their lifestyle habits, which become correlated with their weight, create a worse statistical outlook for them.
But then you have someone else who sits at a BMI of 35, but rather than being there because of poor habits, it’s just because of where their body naturally wants them to sit. They eat well, they exercise, they don’t smoke or drink, they get good rest, they love their job, they have happy relationships. Despite sitting at a BMI of 35, they keep very different habits to the other people who are sitting at a BMI of 35.
So while on paper their weight is the same, the outlook for them is very different. This is why so much of what I do, again, is focused with clients not on the weight side of things, but on creating habits that support their body and doing these regardless of what then happens with their weight.
In our weight-obsessed society, I understand that this can be really hard for people to get their head around. The question I always get is, “If these people are now keeping up healthy habits, how come they aren’t svelte and slim and they aren’t losing weight?” to which I would now like to respond with, how come I can eat just shy of 3,500 calories in 9 weeks and have my weight only marginally increase? Our bodies aren’t simple calorie abacuses. This is what most people want to think they are, but they really aren’t.
What I do want to add, though, is if you have someone who is lean who is keeping unhealthy habits and then you have someone who is obese, especially at the higher end of those obese categories, who is also keeping up unhealthy habits, the person who is in the leaner category has much better of an outlook. Their outlook is also not great, but that’s when being overweight or being obese starts to make a real difference. But if someone is keeping up healthy habits, then it is less of an issue for them, and it should be more about those habits that are creating health as opposed to just the weight.
01:00:20
A legitimate question, then, with all this information might be, do I believe in “calories in and calories out”? The answer to this is yes, I really do. But I would also add that it’s never as simple as it’s made out, and making the mistake of believing that calories in versus calories out is the same as “eat less and move more” is hugely incorrect.
What I want to do now is spend a bit of time looking at calories in and calories out, because it’s something that people are very confused about. It will also show as I go through this why some of the figures that I’ve been using in terms of the calories I consumed as well as the calories that you think you’re eating may be less accurate than you believe.
A lot of this information has come from a couple of great articles by Precision Nutrition and an article in Gizmodo, all of which I’m going to include in the show notes. You can find that at www.seven-health.com/40.
01:01:25
Let’s start with the “calories in” side of the equation. People think that this is just really easy and really straightforward. If you just look at the food that you eat and then you look at the calories of everything you eat, like I did as part of the experiment, then you can know the exact figures. But this is flawed for a number of reasons.
The first is that calorie figures are very imprecise. Every potato that weighs, say, 120 grams doesn’t contain the same amount of carbs, protein, and fats. Every chicken breast of 200 grams doesn’t contain the same amount of carbs, proteins, and fats. Individual foods can vary, and they can vary significantly, but despite this, we use standardized figures.
The variety of the food that you’re eating – what type of potato, what type of strawberry – can have an impact. The growing conditions, like the soil or the temperature, the weather at that time or how much water they got, when the food was picked, or if we’re looking at it from an animal perspective, what the animal was fed, the age of the animal when they were killed – all of these things plus a multitude of other factors could all affect the energy that is contained within a food. So the figures that appear within an online tracking software, or even the figures that appear on the back of the pack of the food that you’re eating are often standardized figures that may or may not match up with what the food actually contains. The error rate for this stuff can be really high, up to as high as 50%.
To put this in real terms, a 6-oz. steak could contain 323 calories at the low end or could contain 506 calories at the high end. A large sweet potato could contain 231 calories at the low end and up to 705 calories at the high end. These are massive differences.
The Gizmodo article does a really great job at explaining the history of all this stuff and how we came to the standardized numbers around calories, which at least for me, I found really fascinating. Again, the article is linked in the show notes, so I’d recommend checking it out.
The next part of the “calories in” equation that is dubious is that we don’t absorb all the calories that are in a food. This is for two reasons. One, it comes down to the individual and what their digestive capability is like. Things like stomach acidity, the level of different pancreatic enzymes, even things like gut bacteria. Then the other is that certain parts of food or certain foods, no matter how good someone’s digestion is, part of that food is not going to be absorbed. This can be because of fiber, it can be because of the hardness of the food for things like nuts. So the exact calorie figures that are listed can then differ to how much someone absorbs.
In my experience through the overeating experiment, it definitely felt like I was digesting less as time went on. It was like my body was just trying to get this stuff through and then get it out, and the absorption and digestion was much less effective due to the increased transit time that my body was now running at.
To give an example of just how much gut bacteria can have an impact on weight, I want to use two different experiments. One was research looking at sets of twins where one of the twins was lean and one of the twins was obese. They then took gut microbes from each of these twins and inserted them into mice. The mouse that had received the gut microbes from the obese twin gained weight; the other mouse remained lean – and this is despite the fact that both of the mice were eating the exact same diet. This is a change in the amount of calories that are absorbed, or there’s possibly some other mechanism, but the actual calories they were eating remained the same.
Another example is a lady who received a transplant of gut microbes from her daughter, and this was to treat an intestinal infection. The transplant was a success in that it treated the infection, but since the lady’s had the transplant, she gained more than 40 pounds, which she’s been unable to shed through diet and exercise. The only thing that has changed is her gut microbes.
I know this sounds very anecdotal, and it is; it’s not part of a double-blind placebo-controlled study or anything along those lines. But the only changes she had were the microbes. Just like her, there’s no way of seeing inside ourselves on a daily basis to see what’s going on with this, but it can have a real impact on the “calories in” figure because of our absorption rate.
How our food is prepared can also affect the number of calories that are available for digestion. There’s a fantastic book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. I read it a couple of years ago, but it was also referenced in the Gizmodo article.
The premise of the book is that the big thing that allowed us to become the humans that we are today is cooking. It’s because cooking breaks down tough parts of meat and plants, making the calories much more readily available. This meant that instead of spending hours and hours of a day eating and chewing and digesting fibrous foods, we were able to get all our calorie needs much easier, allowing us to grow bigger brains, but also to have the time to do the other things that help us to advance and become the societies that we are today.
So cooking a food can massively alter the food’s available calories, and often this isn’t estimated correctly when looking at online calorie figures. The difference between eating vegetables that are raw, eating vegetables that are lightly steamed, eating vegetables that have been boiled and blended into a soup can change significantly. If you then multiply this across multiple meals across many days, the differences can really start to add up.
The final way that the “calories in” figure can be off is that people just aren’t very good at eyeballing their portion of food. If someone is weighing and measuring every last thing that they eat, then this part won’t be an issue for them – but very few people do that, and nor should they. If you’re trying to make an estimate but you’re off a little here and there, over the long run this can really start to add up.
For me as part of the experiment, when I was home, I was trying to weigh everything to be as accurate as possible, but I know this didn’t happen every single time. Or if I was making a big batch of something, I would then have to estimate how much of a portion I think I had as part of that batch, and that could be off a little bit.
This was even harder when I went out. If I went to the pub and I had a burger and chips or some fish and chips or I had a pizza, knowing the exact calories for this meal was impossible. Even getting in the right ballpark was pretty tough. So I’d come home and I’d be looking up lots of different variations of things online for burgers or pizzas or whatever, and those things can vary significantly. I’d then be picking the one that I thought felt about right, but obviously this is still a lot of guessing.
My goal was always to err on the lower side so if anything, my calories would be lower rather than higher. But I still have no idea if this was actually the case.
When we combine all of these different things together, it makes the “calories in” side of the equation not so accurate. With all the figures I was mentioning earlier, these are my best guesses, but with this stuff taken into account, you can see that there’s a fairly significant margin for error.
But what I want to mention, and as I mentioned earlier on, even if I forget the figures, I know personally I couldn’t have eaten any more than I did, and even if I wildly overestimated what I consumed, this would also mean that my body reaches a point of fullness much sooner, meaning that my ability to maintain the weight that I do isn’t because of willpower, but because of my body’s inbuilt functionality that tells me to stop eating.
But if you’re sitting there thinking, wow, this probably means that calorie tracking or keeping track of calories is totally pointless, I would say that I still use this a lot with clients. What I always say is that it’s not an exact science. It can help people to have a bit of an idea of what’s going on, and it can be something that is then used alongside other methods.
Getting people to see what’s going on with their intuition – what is their hunger, what is their fullness like? What is going on with different symptoms and how do they feel eating different foods or different amounts? While tracking your calories isn’t going to be 100% accurate, it doesn’t mean that it’s a totally futile exercise, and for a lot of people it can be useful as long as they keep that idea in mind.
But this also means it’s not for everyone. I don’t use calorie tracking and looking at it for every person I work with, especially because a lot of the people I’m working with are coming from a place of disordered eating or other issues going on. So when making that decision, people need to keep context in mind and work out, is it going to be appropriate for them? Is it going to be helpful for them?
But if someone’s looking at this or coming to this purely from a health perspective, they don’t have anything going on from disordered eating or anything along those lines, then yes, I think looking at calories can be helpful if people are doing it in the right way.
01:11:45
Now that I’ve poked some holes in the “calories in” side of things, let’s have a look at the “calories out” side of things. When people think about the “calories out” side of the equation, they really just think about exercise – but exercise is only just part of it.
The first part of the “calories out” equation is resting metabolic rate, or RMR. This is what your body uses each day in maintaining the most basic bodily functions – things like breathing, circulating blood, growing and repairing cells. I often describe this with people as what you need if you’re in a coma. The figure for RMR depends on weight, body composition, sex, age, genetic predisposition, possibly the bacterial population of your gut. But in a general sense, as your weight increases, so does your RMR.
But RMR can vary quite significantly from person to person and can go up and down about 15%. Despite no more or less effort, someone could need to add or subtract a couple hundred calories extra every day.
One of the big things that could also affect RMR is dieting, which seems to really reduce it. This, again, can be quite a significant reduction. For example, you could have someone who has never been overweight and they’ve always been the same weight in their life and they can maintain that weight pretty easily. The person, as part of maintaining that weight, eats 2,500 calories each day, and if they do this, things are steady.
You then have someone who was previously heavier, and they’ve now dieted down to get to that same weight as that person who’s eating 2,500 calories a day. But in this person’s case, because of the fact that they’ve dieted and that this has then affected their RMR, they now have to eat just 2,150 calories to maintain the same weight. So you have two people who are the same weight, but one of them has to eat 350 calories less each day just to maintain it.
There was a fascinating article that recently came out by Gina Kolata in the New York Times looking at past participants on The Biggest Loser and how so many have struggled to keep their weight off. She looked at their BMR and how much this had been reduced. Even though it’s actually 6 years on since these participants had been on the biggest loser, their RMR has never recovered and it’s still at very low amounts.
This article spread all over the place, and I know lots of people had different opinions on it. Undoubtedly there are safer and more moderate ways for people to lose weight than The Biggest Loser and ways that may spare a reduction or so much of a reduction in their metabolic rate.
But weight loss typically leads to someone having a lower metabolic rate than someone who is at this weight range and has always been there without dieting. With the evidence we have, that pretty much stays there. Even after 6 years – and this is in other experiments as well, not just from this Biggest Loser article – that RMR stays at that lower level, for as far as we know, for the rest of their life.
The next component of the “calories out” figure is the thermic effect of eating. Digesting your food actually uses up calories, and this digesting can typically represent anywhere from 5% to 10% of the calories figure. But not all foods are created equal. In general, you’ll burn more calories in your effort to digest protein, and normally about 20-30% of it is calories. For carbs, it’s roughly 5-6% of calories, and then for fats, it’s worth 3% of calories.
This is why, again, I wanted to have a real variety as part of my experiment, and also why I wanted to keep protein on the lower side. If protein was making up say 30% or 40% of the calories, it would be easy for someone to say that the reason I didn’t gain much was because I used protein and protein uses up more to digest, and this is why it happened. It’s why I also wanted to include lots of processed foods and fiber-free foods, because these are foods that are very simple to digest, so they give much more extra calories in their reduced digestion expenditure. Considering more and more of these foods made up a larger percentage of what I was eating as the experiment went on, it then leads to further head-scratching of why my weight continued to come down and not go up as part of that.
The final two categories as part of the “calories out” equation relate to movement. One is physical activity, and the other is known as non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT. There can be a bit of an overlap here of what goes into which category.
For example, walking or gardening, for some people they consider it part of someone’s physical activity; for other people they consider it part of their NEAT. But if we include these two categories together, it includes any activities that you undertake as part of your exercise regime: running, lifting weights, going for a swim, doing some cycling, whatever it may be. Then it’s also all the other movement that happens during the day – things like walking to work, doing some typing, performing some yardwork, doing some cooking, standing in the shower, fidgeting, etc.
With this all in mind, I want to go through how people can get their “calories out” figures wrong. I’ve already talked about RMR and how dieting can affect this, but really, individuality in the numbers can occur for lots of reasons outside of just dieting – someone’s genetics or their epigenetics, the amount of brown fat that someone has, the amount of sleep that they get, their hormone levels and how this can fluctuate and affect the RMR.
For example, for a woman with her menstrual cycle, when she is in the cycle it can affect the resting metabolic rate. For example, from the point that she gets her period onwards, it starts to increase, and it’s normally the last week before she gets her period that her RMR is at its absolute highest and it’s calling for more calories at that time.
Fitness trackers and exercise machines that tell you how much you’ve used as part of that exercise and how much you’ve used throughout the day are notoriously wrong, and this margin for error can be anywhere from about 5% to upwards of about 25%. For example, if a device says that you burnt 300 calories, in reality it could be 260 or it could be 340.
Also, when someone tries to increase their calories out or one of the variables of calories out, it normally has a knock-on effect on one or possibly more of the other variables in terms of calories out. For example, if someone starts to really ramp up the amount of exercise that they do to burn more calories, often the body will then pull down the RMR or the amount of NEAT that they do. So outside of this intense exercise, they’re now becoming more inactive, and some of the body functions are being reduced to compensate for this new expense. While it feels like all this extra effort’s being put into burning those extra calories, in reality, the end result might be much smaller or it could be basically the same.
These changes in terms of things going up and things going down don’t just happen on the “calories out” side of the equation. Typically if calories are reduced in terms of calories in, calories out are equally reduced, and if calories in are increased, calories out are equally increased. Most of these things are totally unconscious and we don’t even know that they’re happening, and they’re done purely by the body.
It’s through this mechanism that most people are able to maintain their weight without giving it much thought or a thought at all, and it’s not because they’re eating the exact same amount of calories each and every day; it’s because little shifts up and down are matched by the body making little shifts up and down.
Let me use some figures to help put this in perspective. Let’s say that you have a guy and he needs to eat roughly 2,500 calories a day to maintain his current weight. In two years’ time, he jumps on the scale and lo and behold, his weight is the same as it is today. Over those two years, if he’s kept up an average of 2,500 calories a day, he will have eaten 1,825,000 calories – a pretty significant amount when you put it all together like that.
Now let’s just assume that instead of eating 2,500 calories a day, he added in an extra 50 calories a day. This is a tiny amount. It would be something like four or five peanuts or three water cracker biscuits or one tablespoon of sugar – something that could easily happen without someone making any notice of it at all.
Over a two year period, this extra 50 calories a day would account for 36,500 extra calories. Again, if we use the simple but flawed formula of 1 pound equals 3,500 calories, this means an increase of 10.4 pounds, or 4.7 kilos. But despite what this simple math says, most people wouldn’t notice this change, and this is because the body isn’t this static machine, but it’s a living and breathing organism that modulates things based on the feedback that it’s getting from the environment.
So these tiny increases in calories would create a tiny increase in the amount being used while at the same time increasing satiety, and possibly even the next day or the next week, at some point the calorie intake coming down slightly, and then the calorie out figures also coming down slightly.
I hope that better explains “calories in, calories out” and why it’s not the same thing as “eat less and move more.” If someone says to you that a calorie isn’t a calorie, they are correct, because how the body processes it will differ. But this doesn’t invalidate the laws of thermodynamics, and it doesn’t prove that calories in versus calories out isn’t correct. It just shows that it’s not this nice, neat thing that it’s made out to be.
01:22:50
There are lots of people online who are selling weight loss that I totally disagree with. What they’re suggesting as part of this is extreme, even dangerous, and I would say these people need to be avoided. But then there are also lots of people who are selling the idea of weight loss that, while I disagree with selling weight loss, it doesn’t bother me as much because what they recommend is largely what I do with clients – the big difference being that I don’t expect them to necessarily lose weight. They may, they may not, but regardless of what happens with the weight, the changes will improve their health.
Ari Whitten is someone who I’ve had on the show before and whose work I really admire. He has a book called Forever Fat Loss which contains some great advice and looks at the most common drivers for weight gain and what someone can be doing instead. Despite me disagreeing with the fact that these suggestions will always lead to someone losing weight, the ideas and the stuff that he talks about is very sensible, and it’s a very well-rounded idea.
I want to go through the drivers of weight gain that he identifies as part of the book as well as some other ideas that I have that aren’t in the book that I think are equally important. I want to chat about this stuff because these ideas should be the cornerstone of health, and the more of these drivers that someone has in their life, the greater the likelihood is that they’re going to be at a higher weight already or they’re going to be putting on weight.
But as I’ve already said, if someone is then changing their stuff and doing the things that they should be doing, it’s no guarantee that this is then going to lead to weight loss. With that said as well, one thing to keep in mind is you don’t need to be making all of these changes overnight.
So when looking at the potential drivers and some of my suggestions for how to counteract them, you don’t have to change all of them at once. You want to be creating changes that are sustainable in your life and that you can keep up rather than these ideas just turning into another diet. If it takes someone longer to make those changes, then so be it. The more important thing is that over the long haul, they start to happen, or they start to happen as much as is doable for that individual.
I think there is a lot of moralizing around health and what people should be doing, and there’s lots of perfectionism around this stuff, and I definitely don’t want to be driving any of that as part of these suggestions. What I’m wanting to do as part of this section is just to show what other drivers or what other things that make it more likely that weight is going to be going on, so that people understand that information, and then what they choose to do with that is their own decision.
01:25:45
The first driver of weight gain, or the potential driver for weight gain, is highly palatable food or high reward food. This is food that has been scientifically engineered to light up the pleasure centers in the brain in a way that natural food never does. This is problematic because it can override our natural satiety levels and push up the amount that we consume before we get the sense that we are full.
Lots of fears around high reward food is about the additives or the flavorings, and it’s talked about as if these things are inherently toxic. I really disagree with this, and I feel that a lot of this is fearmongering. But what I do agree with is the ability of this stuff to actually drive up the amount that is consumed, and this can be a concern.
The other issue with this kind of food that is very high reward food is that it is providing a lot of pleasure. This can then lead to someone eating this food for reasons other than hunger. The pleasure it provides can then be so strong that people start to use it as an emotional crutch in the same way that someone uses other substances, like cigarettes or alcohol.
But these reasons then lead to people consuming more calories than they ordinarily would, and then not getting the feedback that they’ve overeaten the way that they would if they were eating less rewarding food.
As part of this, it can actually start to increase someone’s weight set point. Rather than hitting that ceiling where they keep that top of their weight band and the body then starts to defend this and starts to get them to eat less or try to bring the weight down, instead the weight set point can start to increase, and in a sense, the body starts to let that happen. At this stage, from a research perspective, we have no idea why this happens, but we can see that it does actually start to happen.
The way to deal with this driver of weight gain is to base much of your eating around whole and unprocessed foods – things like meat, fish, eggs, dairy, fruits, vegetables, beans, pulses, grains, nuts, seeds, butter, coconut oil, olive oil, that kind of stuff – foods that have been staples of our eating for millennia. Not all clients are going to do well on all of this stuff, and personally I don’t use a lot in the way of nuts and seeds and often pulses with clients, but at least from a research perspective, these kinds of unprocessed foods should be what the diet is largely based around.
01:28:30
The next potential driver for weight gain is food diversity. This is often referred to as the buffet effect, as buffets are really anywhere where there’s lots of food options. People tend to eat more. Even just think about finishing up a normal meal, where you’re really full, and you wouldn’t really want to eat another bite of that meal you just had, but then someone suggests dessert, and lo and behold, the thought of that different food now appeals to you, and you can then fit it in.
Part of the reason why traditional societies were lean even when there was no food shortages is because their diet was so simple, and often the same meal would be repeated over and over again. It was having the same meal for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, every single day basically from when you were born to when you died. In that situation, the level of excitement from a meal is going to be fairly in check.
And yes, there would be seasonality and there would be variety in some sense, so maybe your summer meals are different to your winter meals, but within those seasons it would be pretty much the same meal ad nauseam.
It’s when high food variety is then mixed with highly palatable or high reward food that things then really become a problem, because with this combination we then have the likelihood that someone is going to overconsume, and often in quite a big way.
The fix for this, one, is to be eating more simple meals that stick to just a handful of foods. I know that people are encouraged to have a real variety in their diet, and I do agree with this, but maybe this variety should be coming at different meals rather than during the same meal. This is why eating out in restaurants, or it happening a lot, can be an issue, because in a restaurant setting where you have a whole menu to choose from, it’s easy to fill up on one thing, then just order something else like dessert, simply because it’s there.
Personally, I think that if someone is doing a lot of their own food cooking and they’re making their own whole food cooking at home, food variety is less of an issue. So if you’re thinking about following these suggestions, please don’t be freaking out, thinking “I need to be eating really plain and bland food.” This is definitely not the case.
01:30:55
The next possible driver for weight gain is issues with circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythm is the 24-hour cycle in your physiology processes that go on within your body. Certain hormones, systems, and processes naturally increase and decrease at certain times of the day and the night. Unfortunately, there are things that can mess up this circadian rhythm cycle, meaning the processes or hormones aren’t following the patterns that they should be, and this can have a negative impact on health and also a negative impact on weight.
Our circadian rhythm is largely dictated by the light and the cycles of the sun and the moon. As woo-woo and hippie-ish as this may sound, we evolved over millions of years, when night and day would dictate our movement, it would dictate when we were awake, and it would dictate when we were asleep. While we now have access to 24-hour lights and we can make, say, our home environment as if it’s daytime all the time, this is not how our bodies like to function.
There are a couple of things that can really mess with the circadian rhythm. The first is a lack of sunlight. Sunlight penetrates our skin and it’s what helps to wake us up in the morning and get us going. It helps to create Vitamin D. Sunlight gets into our cells through penetrating into our skin and then into our cells, and this increases the cells’ ability to produce energy. So getting adequate sunlight is really paramount to good health.
The next thing that can mess with our circadian rhythm is bright light in the evening time. It’s not necessarily all types of light, but more of the light that falls into the blue spectrum. These are the kinds of lights that are in high amounts on things like computer screens, TV screens, smartphones, tablets, and the modern lights that we have in our home. This blue light can be very stimulatory in a time, especially at nighttime, when our body should be winding down. The body interprets this light as if it’s morning time or it’s daytime, and this then hampers processes that should be happening as part of the circadian rhythm at nighttime.
The next thing that can mess with our circadian rhythm is lack of sleep or poor quality sleep. We now have the ability to stay up all hours, whether we’re talking about someone working on their laptop or working through the night or someone being entertained in front of a TV. This means that lots of people are getting much less sleep than they actually need, or because of different things that that person is doing as part of their diet or their lifestyle, even when they do go to bed at a reasonable time, they have difficulty falling asleep or they’re waking in the night or their sleep is just very restless and not restorative.
I’ve actually done a whole podcast show on sleep that addresses all of the circadian rhythm details in much more detail, so I’ll link to that show in the show notes. I really strongly suggest checking it out, as it’s one of the most listened-to episodes that I’ve done, and lots of people have contacted me to say how helpful it’s been.
But in a general sense to improve your circadian rhythm, you want to make sure you’re getting regular sunshine, which obviously depends on where you live in the world and what season you’re in. In the winter months, in darker or cooler climates, you can use things like a SAD light or a chicken light with a 250-watt incandescent bulb to really increase your light exposure, particularly light in that red and near-infrared spectrum that can be so beneficial.
You want to be avoiding TVs or computers or smartphones or tablets for 2 or 3 hours prior to going to bed, and if there is no way around this, then you want to be using different methods to block out the blue light. You can get programs like Flux for the Mac. On the new iPhones, there’s a setting so you can turn off the blue light at certain times of the day. You can get blue-blocking screens that you can put as covers over your computer or over your TV screen. You can even get blue-blocking sunglasses that you wear in your home at nighttime if you want to go down this route.
Prioritizing sleep and doing the best you can to maximize this – going to bed early, sleeping in complete darkness, making sure you’re adequately fed and hydrated, having Epsom salt baths can often be helpful for people. It’s hard for me to generalize about this sleep stuff because there’s a really long list of different things that people can be doing to help this, but it depends on what people have got going on. As I said, check out the other podcast I’ve done on this, which goes into it all in much greater detail.
01:35:40
The next potential driver for weight gain is metabolic decreasing foods. This could also be food that you struggle to digest that then leads to inflammation, that then could be also creating a problem.
One of the biggest things that I would put into this category of metabolic decreasing foods would be a diet that is high in PUFAs, or polyunsaturated fats. The ones that seem to be most problematic with this stuff, and it probably seems more problematic just because of how much they’ve infiltrated our diet over the last 100 years, is foods that are high in omega-6 oils. These are fats that are highest in vegetable oils – things like safflower oil, sunflower oil, grapeseed oil, corn oil. Because of the cheapness of these oils, they’ve made their way into our food supply over the last century.
We’re now eating something that we do need, but we need in very small quantities, in absolutely gigantic amounts. There’s a lot of research to show that these oils are suppressive to metabolic rate and that this increased consumption is a possible contributing factor to our populations increasing in size. Considering that these oils also appear heavily in processed food, this is also a really bad combination.
These oils or these fats also appear in nuts and seeds, and for this reason, among others, I suggest that clients try and limit these. Look, I know this is probably contentious and there’s tons of research showing the benefits of including nuts and seeds in a diet, so people then need to make the decision that they want to make. But even if someone is including nuts and seeds in their diet, I would then suggest that they decrease or avoid using vegetable oils that are high in omega-6 and that they also minimize or avoid other foodstuff that contain them.
There’s also then the foods I mentioned that people personally can’t digest and that can cause problems through inflammation. For some people this can be grains or gluten. For others this may be a struggle with certain beans or legumes. For others it could be dairy. For others it could be certain raw vegetables. Really, this could be anything. It depends on the individual.
I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with these foods, because there isn’t. I do think that a lot of people are overly fearful, and they’re avoiding particular foods or whole food groups and it’s totally unnecessary. This can be a problem in and of itself. But if you’re eating foods that you can’t digest and these foods are creating an inflammatory response, this could possibly be affecting your metabolic rate and lead to weight gain.
01:38:35
The next possible driver of weight gain is dieting. I obviously talked about this already when we looked at RMR and how RMR is reduced through dieting, but the consistent yo-yo-ing of diets and weight cycling that this tends to push the weight set point up from where someone sits.
The great irony of this is for so long, we’ve been sold the idea that we can diet our way to a lower weight. But in the long run, the active dieting that people are then so encouraged to do increases their weight instead of decreasing it.
The fix for this one is to stop dieting. Constantly restricting foods or calories where it leads to deprivation makes it more likely you’re going to put on weight in the long run. Willpower is a real finite resource, and eventually you start butting up against your own biology, which drives you back to food and your weight back up.
There’s nothing wrong with changing what you eat – and this is often a necessary step for most people regardless of whether they’re trying to change their weight or not, but from a health perspective. But there’s a difference between eating to satiety with whole foods, which is what I would encourage people to do, versus someone actively keeping their calories low and constantly fighting against hunger.
I mentioned earlier about the thermogenic nature of protein and how it uses up a much higher amount of calories to digest. Because of this, lots of research suggests that if someone’s trying to lose weight, they should first set their protein figure and then work out their carbs and fat after this. Protein needs will vary depending on someone’s weight and the amount of exercise they do, but a general starting point is probably 1 gram of protein for every pound that someone weighs.
At some point this figure stops being appropriate. For example, if someone weighs 300 pounds, they won’t necessarily need to be eating 300 grams of protein a day. When weight starts to get higher and higher, protein is often estimated at 1 gram per pound based on someone’s lean body weight. So if you look at someone’s frame, if they were to be leaner, where would their weight lie? Then working the protein out that way.
Another way of looking at it is getting someone to keep their protein somewhere around 20-25% of calories. At this percentage, they will pretty much fall in line with all the other ways that it can be calculated. This is what I mostly do with clients and what I get them to aim for.
01:41:05
The next possible driver for weight gain is macronutrient restricting. Macronutrients are carbs, proteins, and fats, and all of them are important for health and shouldn’t be kept lower than the body needs because if we do, it can have an impact on metabolic rate and therefore lead to weight gain.
This is a tricky one for two reasons. The first is that we’re constantly told that this is what you should do to lose weight, that you should go low fat or you should go low carb, and that if you do this, the weight will just drop off.
The second issue is that what happens in the beginning or in the short term isn’t necessarily what happens in the long term. While going, say, low carb can lead to weight loss to start with, over the long haul it can start to lead to weight gain. This can be confusing because someone initially feels like they’ve finally found the solution to their problems, and for the first 6-9 months or however long, going low carb can really work a treat.
But at some point it stops working, and then rather than someone seeing that maybe restricting their carbs is a problem, people really double down, and they think that they need to restrict their carbs even more. Unfortunately, this just further hurts their metabolism, making weight gain more likely and creating a myriad of other symptoms.
What I do want to say to this is it has been shown that people can do well on a very wide range of different diets, and with varying macronutrient percentages within the diet. While this may be true at a population level, not every individual can do well on every different type of diet and macronutrient amounts. It’s not just about what someone’s genetic makeup is, but how they live their life. What kind of exercise are they doing? What does their job look like? How old are they? What’s their stress levels like? What health conditions are they trying to deal with? All of these different variables can affect someone’s needs and demands for different macronutrients.
This doesn’t mean that everyone really has this narrow band that they have to be keeping up to. For most people, it’s actually the opposite. But when people start to then be pushing at the extremes, where they’re keeping a particular macronutrient too low, this is when it then starts to create a problem. And when I say too low, I mean too low for their needs. So people can be healthy on a low carb diet or a low fat diet or a vegan diet, but just because some person can do that, doesn’t mean that it’ll definitely work for you.
My fix with this stuff is really to avoid anything with the extremes. Understand that the macronutrients aren’t bad, they don’t cause weight gain in and of themselves, and that you should be working out what ranges you do best on. You can do it that way, or you can really just forget about all of this and instead just eat a diet that’s largely based on whole foods that includes the stuff I went through before – meat and fish and dairy and fruits and vegetables, etc. If you’re then eating this stuff in regular amounts, you know that you’re going to be getting everything that you need.
01:44:25
The next potential cause for weight gain is micronutrient deficiencies. Micronutrients are vitamins and minerals. These are substances that are used in the body as catalysts and assist in a whole range of different functions. When they are in too low amounts, functions within the body can start to break down, and one of the problems this can lead to is decreased metabolic rate.
From an evolutionary perspective, when we used to eat food, it would be packed full of micronutrients. Refined and processed foods are then foods where these have been reduced. For some refined products – say something like white rice – this isn’t so much of a problem. For other processed foods, the amount of micronutrients are almost nonexistent, and then this becomes more of an issue, especially as more and more of this kind of stuff makes up space in someone’s diet.
Again, if we’re looking for a fix to this one, it comes back to eating a diet that is based around whole and unprocessed foods. I know it’s not sexy, it’s not as headline-grabbing as say an extreme diet that we’re regularly told and is touted towards us, but it is what is needed to fix that issue.
01:45:40
The next potential cause for weight gain is actually prolonged calorie overconsumption. On one level this seems really obvious. If people are overconsuming calories, they’re going to put on weight. But if we know what we do about the weight set point theory and that the body should fight back to get someone to stop eating and to maintain their weight, why is calorie overconsumption a problem?
Consistently having more calories coming in than the body needs can start to damage the cells’ ability to function properly. Normally as we eat food, it gets digested, then makes its way into our bloodstream. This is then shuttled into our cells, where it’s then turned into cellular energy. If more and more energy is coming in, the cells can in a sense become backed up with how much energy they can produce.
In the beginning, more of this extra stuff then gets stored in fat, but over time the body becomes less capable at doing this because more of the storage space is already taken up. This leads to higher amounts of sugars and fats in the blood, and this can lead to things like insulin resistance and then diabetes.
To quote Ari Whitten directly, “Chronic calorie overconsumption creates a situation where the cells intentionally become less efficient at taking in nutrients and producing cellular energy since they’re trying to protect themselves from the toxicity of chronic overabundance of nutrients in the blood.” By nutrients here, he’s really referring to the carbs, proteins, and fats rather than the micronutrients.
Again, this comes back to food reward and palatability. It’s hard for someone to get to this level of overabundance when eating whole foods because the body stops being hungry and you get the signal to stop eating so much earlier. But with highly rewarding food, you can easily overconsume without noticing. This is something I know from my own overeating experiment. As more and more time went on, the only way I could keep my calories up was to increase the level of refined and processed foods.
Again, the fix for this is to be providing the body with a diet that is largely based around whole and unprocessed foods.
01:48:00
The next potential driver for weight gain is lack of movement and excessive amounts of sitting. I talked earlier about physical activity and NEAT and how crucial they are to the “calories out” side of the equation, so I’m not going to go into this one in great detail. But there are two things I want to say.
First, while most people think of exercise as part of this, really what people should be thinking about is the day in its entirety and how much movement – and movement of all levels of intensity – has been included. We have this fascination with exercise, and typically intense exercise, going and doing a boot camp or doing P90X or Insanity or other such extreme exercises.
But even if someone is doing this three or four or five times a week, this isn’t a lot of moving. If the rest of the time someone is then sat down and working, the amount of movement that someone gets in the whole scheme of things is pretty low.
Alternatively, if someone can be using low-grade movement at regular intervals or for large sections of the day, this is going to drastically increase the amount of “calories out” figure. For those who are in a desk job, one of the suggestions is for them to be doing more of their work while standing up. Or you can go so far as to get a treadmill desk so you’re walking on a treadmill while you’re working.
Obviously this isn’t going to be doable for everyone, and I know these things can be expensive, but the message is that the more time someone can be spending moving during the day, or at least not sitting, the more likely it’s going to help from a weight perspective.
The second thing here is that extended sitting is an independent risk factor. Even if someone is going to the gym regularly, if they’re sitting for a long time, the time at the gym is not going to undo this sitting. The whole sitting thing has been talked about, in my opinion, in pretty hyperbolic terms, and in some places people have talked about sitting as being this generation’s smoking. I don’t think it’s quite that bad or quite that extreme.
But really, the suggestion should be that people should be avoiding sitting for an extended period of time. If you need to spend a large time sitting, doing a project or whatever, then break it up with some of it standing and some of it doing little bits of walking, or some of it even just as simple as every hour, doing a little bit of stretching before sitting down and continuing on with what you need to do.
I will add that people need to be realistic about this stuff. There’ll be certain tasks or certain types of work or certain types of thinking that they’re just much better at doing when they’re sitting down. For these times and these tasks, they should do it sitting down. But wherever it’s appropriate and whenever it can be done, people should be spending as little time sitting as possible.
01:50:55
The next potential driver for weight gain is emotional eating. Emotional eating is a whole spectrum of things, some of which can be rather harmless, others which are not so. For example, having cake for someone’s birthday probably comes under the banner of emotional eating. It’s part of a celebration; it doesn’t really serve any health perspective if we’re thinking about it in terms of nutrient-dense foods. Birthday cake would be emotional eating.
Having a tough day at work and coming home to foods that are for comfort or cheer you up also falls under the bracket of emotional eating. Maybe instead of cooking after a tough day’s work, you come home and you get a Thai takeaway or you go to a restaurant and get a Thai meal, and that’s a form of comfort.
For nearly everyone, this is something that happens in their life. The idea that there’s only some people who emotionally eat is really nonsense when we think about it in this broader sense. But when it starts to create a problem is when emotional eating becomes a regular facet of someone’s life. More and more of what they eat is less about supporting their health and their body and more about supporting their emotions. If this gets mixed up with strong emotions like shame and guilt and this then turns into binge eating, then this can be even more of an issue.
This for me is a big area that few people look at when thinking about weight, apart from maybe paying some lip service to the idea. But if someone uses food in this manner, no matter what dietary changes are suggested, the act of consistently using food as an emotional crutch is going to be a bottleneck in making those changes stick.
The fix for this one is getting to terms with what is going on emotionally and finding other coping mechanisms. Self-care is going to be a big part of this. This often takes a lot of time with people, and it normally also requires some form of therapy or some kind of change work where they look into this. For lots of clients I see, body image is a big component for emotional eating and is a big driver for this stuff – but this isn’t always the case. Really, whatever the reason, regular emotional eating is a potential driver for weight gain.
01:53:15
Another potential driver is a thyroid issue, something that causes some form of hypothyroidism. Your thyroid is often talked about as the master gland in terms of controlling metabolism, and your thyroid and the thyroid hormones that it creates and you create within the body have a direct impact on each of your cells, and this impacts on their ability to produce energy, to produce hormones, to influence what flows into and out of the cells.
This can affect numerous areas in the body, whether we’re talking about slowing digestion, increasing risk of recurrent illness, or increasing lethargy. But one of the most common features of someone having a thyroid issue, especially hypothyroidism, is an increased propensity to put on weight and/or a greater difficulty losing weight.
I’ve actually done a whole podcast on thyroid issues, its diagnosis, foods that support the production of T4 and T3, which are the main thyroid hormones. I strongly recommend checking this out, and I’ll link to this podcast in the show notes.
01:54:25
The next potential driver around weight gain is stress. Stress can actually cut both ways in that it can lead to the suppression of hunger and weight loss, or it can lead to hunger and then a greater propensity to store fat and weight gain, and this is particularly around the abdomen or the middle. I know that stress is a buzzword that everyone talks about, and the one thing I want to make clear is that stress is unavoidable. It isn’t inherently bad. It’s an adaption mechanism within the body, and the body trying to support us and help us.
If it is correctly mediated, then stress isn’t a problem, and it actually is what helps us grow. But it’s when stress goes on for a long time or is happening at regular intervals and the body isn’t being provided with the things that it needs to be able to deal with that stress – whether we’re talking about food or rest or some other form of self-care – this is when stress becomes an issue.
I’ve written two articles on the topic that I’m going to link to in the show notes. One is about my experience with stress and its impact on my weight. I’ve had three distinct times in my life over the last decade where I’ve had some very intense stress that has led to periods of weight gain, even when I was eating less than I normally do. I already mentioned one of these when I was talking about my girlfriend’s ectopic pregnancy last year, but this article goes into details of other areas and is a really good read.
The other article looks at different hormones that are involved as part of the stress process and which combinations will lead to hunger suppression and which would lead to the opposite and people eating more. It’s short; it isn’t too technical, so anyone will be able to understand it. It’s based on the work of Robert Sapolsky from his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, which is probably one of my favorite books of all time. I’ll link to both the article and to this book in the show notes, because I really recommend people checking it out.
There are three more potential drivers for weight gain, and these three are much less in our control and often totally out of our control. They’re areas that too few people talk about, but if we’re really serious about looking at why increased weight is happening, it should really be at the top of the list.
01:56:50
The first of these is weight stigma – the fear of being fat, the persecution that people receive because they’re fat, the fat-shaming that happens both implicitly and explicitly every day – this leads to further weight gain. There has been study after study to show that this is the case. For every person that has been shamed into going to the gym and making changes in their life that lead to weight loss, there are hundreds who’ve had the opposite experience, often without even knowing it.
For example, there was a study released last year that found people who believe that they were overweight or obese were more likely to overeat as a stress response, therefore making actual weight gain more likely. But the interesting thing that this study showed was it didn’t matter if the reality was the case of whether someone was overweight or not; it mattered whether they believed that they were overweight. So you could have someone who wasn’t overweight, but they believed they were, and this would lead to the same pattern and the same weight gain.
There was also another study done in which a group of women were shown a weight stigmatizing 10-minute video clip – things like people overeating, people being unable to fit into clothes, individuals being repulsed by overweight people. They then had a control group, and this control group instead was shown a neutral video.
Once the video was over, the women were then asked to fill out a questionnaire, and while filling it out, they were provided with snacks of M&Ms, jelly beans, and chips. The overweight participant who’d viewed the weight stigma video ate more than three times as many calories as overweight women who were shown the neutral video. From my perspective, some of these women probably consciously chose to self-soothe; I bet the majority of them had no idea that this was happening.
The way that weight is pathologized and the way that we talk about it as if this person is lazy or lacks willpower or the whole morality around food and someone’s body makes it way more likely people are going to put on weight.
There’s no simple fix that you can do for this one – at least not at the society level. Hopefully, one day, weight and talking about weight in a negative way will be seen in a similar way to making racist or homophobic remarks, but I think we’re a long way off this.
At a personal level, people can be following groups or participating in exercise where there is a weight-inclusive focus. This obviously won’t change every situation in someone’s life, but it can also help to shift beliefs, increase self-esteem, and mean that when events or comments or articles do come up that are negative, someone is better suited to deal with it.
I would also add that weight stigma is problematic because it pushes people towards dieting and doing things that are damaging to their metabolism. Rarely do people feel shamed about their weight and then think, “Okay, let me think level-headedly about the assessment of what I’m doing and if it’s supporting my health, and for the areas where it’s not supporting my health, I’m going to make some sustainable changes that are going to be things like eating more fruits and vegetables or going for a walk with a friend to help.”
What they do is they start doing something very extreme that promises rapid weight loss or a whole body transformation in 6 weeks or some other such nonsense. This driving towards dieting and other extreme practices that happen because of weight stigma is very, very damaging and is part of the reason why it can be such a potential driver for further weight gain.
02:00:30
The next potential driver for weight gain is poverty, and this is a really huge issue. Part of the reason for this is that poverty makes it much more likely that someone is going to be having all of the other drivers for weight gain going on in their lives. It’s more likely that food is going to be coming from processed and convenient foods for someone in poverty. This is often due to a time issue. If you’re working two or three jobs, you’re working 12 to 14 hours a day just to get by, you don’t have the luxury of time to prepare a lot of your own foods. You’re just trying to get something in and then get on with everything else that you have to do around the house and to look after kids and everything else.
Also, good quality food may not be available despite someone’s desire to eat well. If you are well off and you’re used to walking into a big supermarket or going to a Whole Foods, food availability issues may seem like some crazy idea, but there are lots of places that are like food deserts, where fresh foods just aren’t in available supply, and what is on offer is often things that have a long shelf life and that are processed. Typically these areas where there are problems with food availability is in less affluent areas.
Because poverty is also something that’s hard to get out of, it’s often the case that your parents were also poor, that their parents before them were also poor. If this is the case and your parents never cooked and your grandparents never cooked, you don’t have much of a role model or a reason to think that you should be cooking yourself. It can be such an alien concept that people don’t even know where to start – and this is before we then remember that they don’t have time, they don’t have the money, they don’t have much of a fresh food selection to cook from.
Exercise also isn’t so easy if you’re in poverty. Again, you have the lack of time. Those living in poverty can’t also afford to have a gym membership. Getting outside to do exercise might not be very safe depending on someone’s neighborhood. It’s easy for people living in nice areas to think, “Why don’t they just go for a walk or why don’t they do some exercise in the park?” But if outside of your house or your local park is not a safe place to be, people will rightfully avoid spending time there.
Sleep and circadian rhythm is often a problem for those living in poverty. This can be from the stress and the worry about money or keeping down a job. It could be because someone has to work night shifts and they’re working nights or working the graveyard shift just to make enough money. I know that shift work isn’t exclusively a reality for those who are poor – you’ve got doctors, you’ve got pilots, you’ve got other professions that commonly have to do shift work. Actually, regardless of income status, shift work is terrible for the body because of its impact on circadian rhythm. But when someone is poor, it’s often mixed with a whole host of other drivers that make weight gain and poor health even more likely.
Stress is a huge one for those living in poverty, and not just because of its effect on sleep, but because of its effect on everything. If you’re worried about your next paycheck or paying the rent or about your kids making their way to school in their bad neighborhood, it’s going to have an impact. The likelihood of single parent household also increases drastically with poverty, which is also a huge stress. Pretty much any way you slice it, poverty leads to increased stress, and this makes weight gain more likely.
One of the biggest stresses here is also lack of autonomy. People don’t feel in control of their own life and they don’t feel like they have much choice or much hope. Even if we remove all the other factors, this lack of autonomy all on its own is a huge risk factor for poor health and also for weight gain.
Pretty much every other driver that I’ve talked about is made worse because of poverty, and it’s why lots of people talk about weight stigma and the prizing of thinness as being a class issue – which it really is. So much of the health advice and the rhetoric is completely elitist and not available for huge chunks of the population.
Then, instead of realizing the legitimate limitations that these people have, we then call them lazy, a burden on the national health, that they should care about themselves more and care more about their health. The delusional idea that anyone can be doing some exercise or doing a juice fast or cooking all of their own meals is really insulting. Honestly, if people really cared about weight at the population level rather than talking about it in ways to shame and ostracize people, then looking at ways to seriously tackle poverty is the answer. But instead, it seems much easier just to blame the individual, to wipe your hands because you’ve done everything else.
02:05:20
Then the final driver for weight gain is the health of your parents at the time of conception and the mother’s diet while pregnant. So much of what happens to a human and their health is set by the time they’re already born. This isn’t completely set in stone, and people’s choices during their lifetime surely have an impact, but what happens in utero makes certain outcomes much more likely.
There have been numerous studies done on children who were born to mothers who were going through a famine and what happened to them by the time their kids hit 30 and 40 and 50 years of age. Typically what is seen is that these children who were born under these conditions are much thriftier, so they have more of a propensity to put on weight. They often have more issues in terms of diabetes and other issues.
We’re really in the infancy with all this stuff, with understanding what causes what. Whether we’re looking at calorie reductions, calorie overconsumption, micronutrient deficiencies, high reward food, it’s an area that with time I believe will show that so much of today’s increased weight levels are stemming from conception and what happened during pregnancy.
While I don’t have any information on it, I would love to see how age of pregnancy starts to affect this stuff, particularly in regards to things like weight or diabetes or other areas. In the last 30 years, at least in the developed world, the age of one or both parents at the time of conception has increased fairly drastically. Maybe there are some benefits to this, as parents are more emotionally mature and there’s more financial stability for some people by the time that they have a child, but there’s also then the potential downside from a physiological perspective and the quality of the sperm and the egg at this age and how this is going to affect things.
For this one, I’m a little greyer on the exact details, but know that on some level it’s going to be having an impact, and in certain circumstances, it’s going to be making it more likely that people are going to gain weight throughout their lifetime.
So that is my list of things that make weight gain more likely. For most I’ve given some ideas of things that can be done to counter them or for you to do instead. Not all of these things are going to be doable or even appropriate for everyone. For example, if someone’s trying to heal their relationship with food and they’re coming from very disordered eating, being okay with having less whole foods in their diet is probably going to be a good thing for them. In time, maybe they can get to a place where they’re following more of these guidelines, but people need to be realistic about what is doable and what is most important for them right now.
02:08:05
As I said at the start of this section, even if someone is changing these things, weight loss is not guaranteed. An improvement in health is very, very likely, but whether this then translates to weight loss is a very different story. I’ve actually worked with over the last year two women who are both over 100 kilos, or 220 pounds, and have BMIs in the range of 36 or 37.
In both instances, they came to me with lots of health problems and lots of symptoms, and I didn’t make the assumption that this was just because of their weight, but more so because of their habits. Over time, we started to change what they were eating, how much alcohol they were drinking, having them include more movement and exercise, having them deal with emotional issues and how this impacts on their eating, and lots of other factors that I’ve just gone through.
In both cases, their symptoms have now totally disappeared. When they are busy or when they’re not on top of things, these things can start to come and creep back in, just the same way as it does for all clients regardless of their size. But as soon as they get back to doing what they know works for them, their symptoms disappear. In both instances, these women are much healthier than before we started – and I mean this physically as well as mentally and emotionally.
And in both cases, despite all the changes they made, these clients still weigh roughly the same as when they started. Their health has improved, while their weight has stayed basically the same. When I look at what they ate, I eat significantly more than both of them on a daily basis. Despite the fact that they weigh 40-50 kilos, or 90-110 pounds more than me, I still out-eat both of them, and quite significantly.
Now, with this said, I want to add that there is nothing wrong with someone wanting to lose weight, and there is nothing wrong with someone attempting to do so.
02:10:00
But what I want people to know before starting this endeavor is the facts about whether this change to their weight is really going to make the changes that they’re after. The changes that most people are after are twofold. One is improvement to their health, and the other is an improvement to their aesthetics or how they feel about their body, and it’s not normally in this order that they want to have these changes happen if they’re being truthful.
On the improved health front, losing weight only helps with health if what someone is doing is actually supporting their body. If someone keeps up healthy habits and as a byproduct, this leads to weight loss, then congratulations, this is great, and they’re one of the lucky ones.
But people shouldn’t confuse weight loss with increased health, because they’re not necessarily the same thing. If someone is starving themselves, if they’re cutting out complete food groups or macronutrients, if they’re over-exercising, or a whole host of other unhealthy behaviors, the new lower weight doesn’t necessarily mean more health, and in most cases it leads to worse health, with the likelihood that all the weight will be regained with some more for good measure. If you want to lose weight, that is fine, but make sure you’re not destroying your health in the process.
Then the second reason that people want to make changes to their weight is for aesthetic reasons. They want to look a way that society deems as sexy or attractive or whatever adjective you want to use to describe the change. There are a couple of interesting things with this one.
One is that what we are chasing from an aesthetic perspective is very culturally biased. Yes, we have an innate desire and things that we look for in a partner that is biologically wired, but a huge component of what we think is inbuilt desire is actually culturally conditioned. You just have to look around the globe to see the weird and wonderful things that people do to appear attractive that then seem crazy to us, simply because it’s not something that we’ve been taught to value.
The second interesting thing is that people don’t really care about their weight in a vacuum. They care about this stuff because of how they believe it will make them feel. People believe that when they are a certain weight, that they will be confident, that they’ll walk into a room and they’ll turn heads, and how amazing this is going to feel, that they’ll be hit on by guys or girls, and that this will make them feel good. It’s not about the body; it’s about the feelings that they think that body will generate.
But there’s some problems with this logic, and the first is that someone can still feel the same feelings of confidence or sexiness or assuredness or whatever feeling they want to feel at whatever weight or size they currently are. While they may find it hard to believe, it can and it does happen every day.
The second is that just changing your external appearance doesn’t guarantee the kinds of feelings you think it will deliver. It’s a nice fantasy, and people often use it as a fuel to keep them dieting, restricting, and overtraining, but being in a thinner body won’t necessarily create these amazing feelings.
I’ve seen this in countless clients who have stunning bodies that most people would kill to have, but who are miserable and feel fat and ugly and unacceptable. I’ve seen it in clients who’ve lost lots of weight, got to their goal of where they thought they’d reached this place of confidence and charm, only to find that they suffer with the same feelings of inadequacy and not-enough-ness, but they’re just in a smaller body.
Too much of what people are trying to deal with are internal issues that relate to thought patterns and habits and emotions. But rather than dealing with this at the internal level, what they try and do is mess with the external in hopes that it will change this. In the same way that no amount of can cure someone’s depression, no amount of weight loss can cure someone’s insecurities about who they are. On the surface level it seems like it should, but in reality it doesn’t actually happen.
That is the end of this rather monumental podcast. It’s taken a lot of writing, a lot of research, a lot of force-feeding for me, but hopefully, it has been eye-opening and you’ve expanded your knowledge about the topic of weight.
This is something I am hugely passionate about, and I want to see a change in the way that we talk about and think about weight. It frustrates me to see the glut of privileged wellness bloggers who have always been slim giving advice about what they do to “stay slim,” as if it’s some secret. When people ask me what I do to stay lean, my response is “it’s just luck, and this is my body type.” Sure, there are things that I do to help it, but I’d be kidding myself if I believed it was all down to my hard work.
We do have some influence over our weight, but not in the simple way that most people make out, and for a lot of people the amount of real influence that they have, when they take into account their life situation due to poverty, it may be much smaller.
This isn’t all doom and gloom. I want people to be healthier, and I do want people to be doing things that support their body, but the idea that these things will then automatically translate to a svelte and slim body isn’t even close to reality.
With everything we know, we are actually in a better place to prevent weight gain rather than reverse it. Once it’s on, the chances of successful weight loss are fairly slim apart from losing a couple of pounds or a couple of kilos. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. This is based on statistics, and you are not a statistic; you’re an individual, so your results may differ from what the averages are at a population level. But as I said, the focus from my perspective should be on health, and if that translates to weight loss, then great. If not, then so be it.
If you have any comments or any questions about the show, feel free to leave a comment on the show notes page. The address for the show notes, again, is www.seven-health.com/40. I hope you have a really great week, and I’ll catch you next week, when I’ll be chatting with another guest. Cheers.
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Hi there Chris,
I was really interested in this podcast but it was a bit too long. Could you have a transcript included so that we could read and get a summary of your findings?
xA
Hi Chris
Mammoth effort for sure, was very informative. Thank you
A couple of questions :
-To what extent does someone have to diet that it messes up with their metabolism for life? ( like example of biggest loser contestants you mentioned)
-About PUFAS, you mentioned oils mainly but is there any concern eating too much PUFAS if one eats a lot of day chicken and salmon? ( the two foods I know of with highish PUFA if I’m correct )
Hi Geraldine,
With the first question about the extent to dieting and metabolism, this is very person specific. I’ve had clients diet for decades and yet there metabolism didn’t seem too affected. Others who have done similar things are now significantly heavier and put on weight very easily. So while we know dieting can reduce BMR/RMR, how much of an impact depends on the individual.
In regards to the second question about PUFAs, while I feel that the benefits of omega 3’s are overblown, the scientific literature on against omega 3 is not as conclusive as against the omega 6s, which is why I mentioned the vegetable oils more than other high omega 3 foods. With these fats there seems to be less of a problem if they are in whole food form in comparison to when they are extracted as an oil. This is often due to the extraction process and the sensitivity that these oils then have to heat, light, oxygen, etc. So for example you may have some vegetable oil or even some fish oil that is used over a period of months and months, constantly exposed to these things. But if you eat nuts or a piece of salmon then this exposure time is decreased.
I would also add that from a normal dietary perspective it is much more difficult for people to go overboard on omega 3 versus omega 6 and this is because the vegetables oils are added to so many foods but it is rare for this to happen with omega 3 rich oils.
So I do think PUFAs in general can be a problem in too high amounts, but for the majority of people this is the omega 6 causing the problem.
Cheers,
Chris
*say chicken & salmon
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