How does someone’s metabolism impact the calories consumed vs calories burned equation?
In: Biology
The biggest problem with any dietary studies, especially weight gain and weight loss is that there are so many factors to disentangle
* First, conducting long therm statistically significant studies on people in a closed environment is prohibitively expensive. It also pays to follow who is paying for that study.
* Self reporting is wildly innacurate. People lie on these things, or misremember
* Your base metabolic rate: how fast you burn calories doing basically nothing is dependant on
* Gender
* Age
* Genetics
* Muscle mass
* SO many other factors.
* Absorbance of calories is also related to those same factors, as well as your gut microbiome. Experiments with mice have shown that giving a fat mouse a ‘fecal transplant’ from a more skinny mouse drasticly reduced the fat mouse’s weight. The bacteria adapt to what you eat, but also, they influence you to want the food they need.
* The kind of food you eat also determines if it is pushed into your fat cells or made available for burning more easily
* Also, the body will adapt to most dietary regimes eventually, in a process called Homeostasis. The body will do anything to stay the same. It’s why you regain so fast after breaking a diet.
* Evolutionarily speaking storing fat was an advantage
* Calorie expenditure is also very person dependant when active.
Long story short: Food and calories are complicated, and anyone reducing it to calories in calories out is not seeing the whole picture.
Because metabolism equals how many calories you burn each day so if your metabolism burns 4000/day and mine burns 2000/day, but we eat the same 2000 each day. One of us is going to burn a lot of fat.
One option is how much calories you take out from the food. Let’s say you read the label that this food has 100 calories but your metabolism only takes 90 from it. It would be a shitty metabolism in a famine but at these times of over-eating this saves you from weight gain. It can come from less efficient digestion or less efficient conversion of food. Anyhow just produce less energy from the same amount of food.
Another option is that your metabolism heats your body a bit more than usual. More heating is a bit more on the “calories out” side of the equation. It can come from actual heating or more heating while workout or more sweating. Whatever loss of heat.
Let’s say that your body uses some number of calories a day.
* Is it around 2200, or around 2200?
If you eat less than that, how do you feel? Where does the lack of chemical energy hit your first?
* Does it make it hard for you to concentrate?
* Does it make you hungry?
* How severely does it have those two effects? Just a little, or a lot?
* Does your body use less energy to compensate?
If you eat more than that, what happens? Where does the extra chemical energy go?
* Does your body burn some of it as heat?
* Does your body use it to enlarge your fat cells?
* In what proportion do those 2 things happen?
Answering questions like that are matters of your metabolism.
Maybe if I go on a diet, I feel only slightly hungry, and can only work at 90% capacity, but I’m otherwise ok. But maybe if you go on a diet, you feel extremely hungry, and can only work at 50% capacity.
Maybe if I overeat, 60% of that excess energy is burned at heast, and 40% becomes fat. And maybe it is the opposite for you.
So your metabolism will impact how much cost and benefit you get from dieting.
For one person’s metabolism, dieting might be more punishing, and less successful; they can absolutely still lose weight through dieting, but they’ll have to work harder at the diet, or suffer more for it, than someone with a different metabolism.
Well take for example fat. White fat is the fat that just stores energy. But brown fat doesn’t store that energy but burns it to generate heat. So simply said if energy is metabolised by brown fat it is gone as heat, whereas with white fat it’s stored.
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