I used to think weight loss was pretty simple – calories in vs calories out. No matter what you consume, the total number of calories are what make you gain/lose/maintain weight, right? I was recently diagnosed with PCOS and mild insulin resistance. Everybody’s saying that IR makes losing weight incredibly difficult, which is quite a bummer as I’m currently trying to drop several pounds. What I’m wondering is: How does insulin resistance affect the whole CICO rule (the law of conservation of energy, nonetheless!)? It seems sort of unrealistic for IR to make you an exception to the laws of physics. Is it more related to appetite and increased food intake or does it actually alter the way your body uses energy?
In: 6
CICO doesn’t mean what most people think it means…
There are two things that people miss…
The first is that the body is an adaptive system that is driven by hormones, so the body can control the CO part of the equation. It can also attempt to control the CI part of the equation by controlling hunger.
The second is that the body has no “calorie counting” function. Everything is done through hormones.
For people with normal metabolism, if they reduce the amount they eat slightly, the body will sense that there is insufficient energy and it will dip into the person’s fat stores. Though *generally* people with normal metabolism don’t have weight issues as their leptin system works to down-regulate their hunger if their fat mass goes up.
People with insulin resistance have broken metabolism; their livers are producing glucose that is not needed and that means they have elevated insulin *all the time* (otherwise known as hyperinsulinemia). When the body has too much glucose, it tries to burn it off and it does this by reduce the amount of fat metabolized. Normally that’s not an issue, but for people with insulin resistance is happens *all the time*.
If they try to eat fewer calories, the body cannot effectively access stored fat because of the elevated insulin, so the body tries other strategies to fix the issue. It turns down your metabolism, limits your exercise, and tries to get more calories.
In other words, you get cold, tired, and hungry.
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