9 Effective Weight Loss is a Result of Increased Metabolism – Answer
#9 – Effective weight loss is a result of an increased metabolism
Answer: FALSE
This is probably the most consistent myth that simply will not go away. I think the problem comes from people not understand what the word ‘metabolism’ even means.
Metabolism is simply a word that describes the total processes of your body at a given point in time.
The processes of your body require a certain amount of energy to keep them going. When we eat just enough to keep everything humming along we will not gain or lose weight. When we eat more than our body need it will simply store the excess for a later date. When we eat less than it needs your body will use up some of the stored energy it has in fat cells.
Even very lean people have weeks and weeks of stored energy in their fat cells. Obese people have months and sometimes YEARS of stored energy.
In reality if you did a measurement of the metabolic rate of overweight or obese people and a group of lean people (at the same age and height) you would find that the overweight and obese people have a ‘higher’ metabolism and burn MORE calories per day. This is because they simply have more body mass to deal with and have more stuff going on.
The fallacy is thinking that there is a ‘speed’ that your metabolism can go and that you can somehow speed it up to burn more calories. This is not the case.
At one point in the mid 80′s up to the mid to late 90′s there was an underground drug that could do this exact thing. It was called DNP and bodybuilders took it to get shredded. The problem is it caused such a dramatic change that people would run a fatal fever and die. You could say that some of these guys actually cooked themselves from the inside out!
The point is this. Any drug or supplement or intervention that could actually melt fat off your body without eating less will also be so dangerous that it could easily kill you.
Anything intervention (drug, supplement, infection, disease) that actually changes your metabolism to any great degree is dangerous and usually requires medical attention.
Just think of how little wiggle room you have with a fever. Normal body temp (oral) is around 98.2 degree F. If you increase your ‘metabolism’ to a point where you are just a few degrees higher (around 102-3 degrees F) you’re in big trouble. So what makes anyone think increasing their metabolic rate is a good thing, or even possible?
Things like working out cause transient increases in energy expenditure which are not to be confused with ‘metabolic rate’.
There’s nothing you can really do to change the rate at which your metabolism functions, so the only two things you can do is exercise more to burn some more energy and eat a bit less to force your body to dip into fat stores to make up the difference.
John
11 Responses to “9 Effective Weight Loss is a Result of Increased Metabolism – Answer”
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November 25th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
John, why is there a theory that when you cut your calories for long periods of time (weeks, months), your metabolism “slows down”, as a defense mechanism. It makes sense from an evolution perspective to think that when there was no food around, the body would have to adapt and burn less calories to keep us alive, if there is no food around, and we still burn 2,000 calories a day, we would eat up our own body pretty fast.
Also, many years ago i took thermogenics that still contained ephedra (when this was legal), and i remember that those things really did work (it made me angry all day, but worked, lol), i mean, you could eat the same amount of food and still burn fat. What did those do? if they didnt increase the metabolism rate, then what was the explanation?
November 26th, 2009 at 8:48 am
[...] Effective Weight Loss is a Result of Increased Metabolism [...]
November 26th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Mike,
That theory is a misinterpretation of some good research done on human starvation. The reason there is a decrease in daily metabolic rate after months of starvation is simply because these people have less total body mass. But this only happens to people who are starving…for real starving.
This would never happen to you and me.
As for the thermogenics you tried. I can’t say that you’re not remembering things accurately (but scientifically there is good evidence to show that our memories are not reliable at all)…and I also can’t tell you that you didn’t lose weight without eating less (although scientifically there is no proof at all that thermogenics can help with weight loss beyond their effect on reducing calorie consumption)…
So I can say that in any well controlled research study the only thing ephedra can do is reduce appetite and cause people to perhaps eat less, but they certainly cannot just heat you up and make you burn more calories and lose weight with the same amount of food eaten. <— this has never been shown to happen, and if you say it happened to you, then you’re the only person in the world so far.
You most likely just don’t really remember exactly what you ate and are assuming that the supplements somehow caused weight loss on their own.
Btw there is also some good research to show that people can’t even remember what they ate 24 hours ago let alone years later.
I’m not suggesting you personally have a bad memory, I’m pointing out that none of us can accurately remember things from so long ago, especially something as particular as daily calories consumed.
JB
November 26th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I see your point, but those ephedra based supplements, did make you sweat a lot and gave you tons of energy, i dont think all they did was suppres hunger…ephedra free thermogenics definetely dont work as good as the ephedra based, i took both and there was a huge difference. Anyone who has taken the ECA stack (ephedrine, caffein, aspirin) know those things did make you lose weight, of course ephdra was unhealthy and related to heart attacks and was discontinued. I remember days when my heart was beating so fast and so hard i got scared.
November 26th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Another example are steroids, ive never taken any, but i know that some steroids help you lose fat and get ripped quick. Do those increase metabolic rate or how do those work?
November 26th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Mike,
The ECA stack was definitely potent. I used to use that stuff and I worked for a couple supplement companies that sold fat burners based around that stack. Still there is no evidence to prove that the ECA stack alone can cause real fat loss without eating less. I think it’s a double effect…ECA gives you so much energy that you end up doing more work in the gym and are more active throughout the day and eat slightly less…the combination of the extra exercise and movement with a slight drop in calories could easily account for all the weight loss seen with these products…and lets not forget the diuretic effect this stack has…it’s not uncommon for an ECA stack to cause a drop in water retention as well. All of these factors can contribute to what appears to be fat loss without eating less.
The diuretic effect of supplements like these was something we knew about and we also knew that our customers would be happy with any kind of weight loss even if it was just a drop in water.
JB
November 26th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Steroids work on a completely different system and are much more powerful than ECA or any over the counter fat burner you could ever find.
The specifics of how they work are too complicated to get into here, but the bottom line is that they signal the muscle cell to start growing faster and bigger and it might be that this enhanced rapid growth causes enough of a metabolic demand that it does in fact cause a large enough increase in calorie burning that you might actually get leaner. On the other hand I know many guys who have taken lots of steroids and were just as fat while they were using them as they were before they used them. So it’s not very obvious what is going on with fat loss associated with steroid use.
Some research indicates that taking testosterone without even working out will cause you to build muscle, get stronger and decrease your bodyfat %….but be careful with interpreting the last part…if your muscles got bigger and your total fat stayed the same, your PERCENTAGE of fat will still drop…so it would appear that you lost fat, but in reality you built up so much muscle the same amount of fat now accounts for less % of your total body weight.
JB
December 10th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Hey John,
This is building on MikeGP’s comment earlier. I’ve read so many books by registered nutritionists that they all start to blend together, and I’ve gone through too many lectures on metabolism in my HKIN classes, where they all say that you should eat small meals frequently, and not skip breakfast. I’m getting really tired of that, especially since people quote it as law now. One book in particular that bugs me is “The Metabolism Advantage”, by some of the guys at Mens Health.
Anyway, I tried the ‘eating small meals frequently’ deal for a while, and I gained weight. Realistically you can’t expect to do that unless you plan to avoid eating with anyone else, since they’re going to be eating normal sized meals. Not to mention, for me at least, just having food around makes me eat more. So the more frequently I seek out food, the more I eat. My point is, these studies done on starvation, and the studies that show a relationship between skipping breakfast and obesity (which I chalk up to the fact that if you skip breakfast, naturally your blood sugar drops later in the day and most people will gorge themselves on junk food at that point), how do you defend the position that any drop in metabolism, or gain in metabolism by eating frequently, is insignificant compared to overall calorie consumption? I don’t even know for sure if there is a drop or not, insignificant or not, maybe you can clear that up for me. I’ve also heard people say “if you eat less frequently, but the same calories, you’re going to put on way more fat than if you’d eaten the same amount but in smaller portions more frequently”. Is there any study I could look at to see where this all started?
Sorry for the long post!
December 11th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
The frequency of meals is an interesting issue. I think it depends on the person and his/her specific problem. For someone who eats really big meals, smaller meals could be a good solution. And for someone who snacks all day, reducing frequency of eating could be a good idea. I’m in the former category. I eat big meals. When I eat two meals a day, I actually maintain a weight of ~255 pounds. Three and I gain weight. So clearly those are big meals.
For a long time I’ve been focusing on diets like Warrior Diet, Fast-5, IF, etc. These may be the wrong approaches for me, esp. the first two. IF is better because you’re supposed to eat normally after the fast, but in the real world, people like me can end up over-compensating. Several months ago, I tried two IF’s per week for three or four weeks and I lost a pound or so. Pretty paltry. It’s pretty to easy to wipe out the calorie deficit of two fasts with over-eating the rest of the time, and I know Brad and John would agree with that. But with the Warrior Diet and Fast-5, you’re supposed to get most (WD) or all (Fast-5) of your calories in a relatively small time period, and that may be the wrong approach for someone who tends to eat excessively large meals. Perhaps it’s “snackers” who tend to benefit from these approaches…?
I think my underlying desire has been to find a way to lose weight while continuing my bad habit of eating too much in one meal. It’s been one great big juicy rationalization. So lately I’ve been tinkering with the idea of eating small-to-medium meals. Not six meals per day, that’s a bit much. More like three or four. In particular, I need to reduce the size of my dinner meals. Those are so big. This is all probably pretty obvious for other people: eat less in each meal. Duh! But it’s a different thought process for someone who has been trying to rationalize eating bigger meals for a few years now.
I don’t know how much weight I’ll lose, but at the very least it should help me to develop better habits. Later I could combine this with one or two IF’s per week, but for now, I don’t want to do anything that could potentially contribute to my compulsive over-eating. So it’s small-to-medium meals for now.
December 11th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Yeah I see your point Jordan. I’m on the other side from you. I used to be a big fan of snacking, which is why the frequent meal weight loss strategy appealed to me. It justified me always thinking about what to eat next. It got to the point where I thought it was imperative to eat every 2-3 hours, and I’d have to screw up plans and work supervision to go find a snack. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say food ruled my life at this time. It lasted for a couple months, until I started to realize what I’d been doing. I started IFing and it just clicked for me. I’ve lost a bit of weight, and gained 3lbs of muscle living this way so far, plus I feel in control of food. If I don’t have any food, I don’t stress about it. I can spend all day in the library researching and studying, foregoing lunch cause it’s more work than it’s worth. Saves me money too. I do struggle with the occasional night binge, but it’s usually not enough to even put me over caloric balance even for one day.
December 12th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Exactly. Well put. We had the same problem, using a diet to rationalize a bad habit, but from different ends of the spectrum. It’s easy to see how IF would work for you. Eventually I think it’ll help me, too. Once I get to eating a normal amount of food the vast majority of the time, I can add some IF’s to contribute to that effort. But I think, at least for me, the “normal amount of food” has to come first. Then I can use IF’s as the icing on the cake.
It really boils down to good vs. bad habits, and being in control of what one puts in one’s mouth. People focus so much on things like insulin, carbs, protein, ghrelin, leptin, hormones, etc., but it seems like diet is overwhelmingly a behavioral issue for most of us.