'The Metabolic Shift'
The usual piece of advice given by Doctors and other health related professionals in relation to fat loss is to ‘Eat Less and Move More’, which is a way of saying take in fewer Calories, and use more Calories through physical activity. And in all likelihood if you follow this advice you will lose weight; although not necessarily fat. The problem with the ‘Eat Less, Move More’ maxim is that it makes it progressively harder to lose, or even maintain, weight. It creates what is known as a ‘Metabolic Shift’.
‘Move More’
In brief, here’s the way it works. The usual exercise promoted for weight loss is aerobic type exercise, there are many reasons why this has become so, but as you’ll see the idea is actually based on faulty logic. Aerobic activity increases efficiency in utilising energy especially the pathway that uses fat as a fuel. So the more trained this system the more efficiently the body can use fat, and for people whose sports require them to perform for long durations such as distance runners, this is a great adaptation. For fat loss, it’s disastrous.
Let’s use an automotive analogy to see why it’s terrible for fat loss. Take two cars; one being the newest eco-friendly designed model; and the other a huge off-road vehicle the size of a small house. If you wanted to save money on fuel bills, which model would you choose? The obvious answer is the eco-model. Why? Because everything about its design is specifically directed towards efficiency, from its size, to the way the engine produces power. On the same tank of fuel, the eco-model would do a week’s worth of journeys, whereas in the off-roader you may be worried about being able to reach the end of your driveway.
Now substitute a human body for the cars, and substitute fat for petrol. Which model would you choose for fat loss? The ‘off-roader’ of course. It will use many-fold the amounts of fat that the eco-model uses. So why do we get told to train our bodies so that they develop into eco-models? Good question.
‘Eat Less’
Let’s look at the other half of the equation ‘Eat Less’. ‘Eat Less’ again, like ‘Move More’ is based on faulty logic. ‘Eating Less’ is another way of saying take in fewer Calories, which, if you’ve been following HPC-UK for a while, you’ll know that this ‘Calorie concept’ in itself is a fallacy when it comes to Human metabolism; so it’s already on shaky ground. Your body is not merely a static machine; it’s one of the most sophisticated creations in existence, so you shouldn’t really expect it to respond in a simple way to a change in its environment.
Going back to the car analogy, regardless of how much fuel is put into the tank, the car will continue to use the same amount of petrol to fuel its functions. The car doesn’t care if you only put in a days worth amount of fuel, it will continue to burn this fuel in the same way it would as if it had a full tank. The human body doesn’t work this way. If you put less energy into the body, the body will sense this and then make huge adaptations to its function so that it increases the efficiency in fuel usage. Not only does it do this, it will also make changes so that a larger percentage of energy taken into the body will be partitioned towards fat storage as this is the most efficient storage form of energy in the body.
People who have undergone a metabolic shift generally feel cold. This also compromises their immune system so they are more susceptible to chills and infections.
The human body is not a mere machine; it’s a dynamic organism that adapts to its environment. However, the body is still treated, even by very educated individuals that should really know better, as a simple mechanism.
So ‘Eat Less, Move More’ is based on a totally wrong premise, however it is still the most widely used approach for losing weight, and we can see the results of this maxim in others and probably in yourself in the past. The results? Eventually ending up fatter and less able to lose or even maintain weight. I’m sure this wasn’t the result you were after, but in all likelihood it’s the one you got. Why? Regardless of how strongly willed you are, because of the increasingly efficient manner the body operates when asked to reduce energy intake and expend more energy, it becomes only a matter of time, where you can’t realistically starve yourself any further, put in any more time into increasingly longer bouts of exercise or a combination of both. And when you do break, and you will, the body has become so efficient that any excess of food or drop in activity, no matter how miniscule will be cause fat accretion at an alarming rate.
Simply put, once more normal levels of either activity or food intake is resumed the body had adapted to doing ‘more with less’ and promptly stores the excess as fat
Be very careful with the questions you ask your body, as the answers (adaptations) last a loooong time after your temporary change in diet or exercise finishes.
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