I heard that “metabolism slows down” and that our body becomes “more efficient”…how? What does this concretely mean? Also, how can we get out of this loop and start losing weight again?
I wrote “diet” because I’m talking about a DIY one, but I guess diets made by professionals also have to be adjusted every now and then.
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Your body gets use to operating on a lowered calorie intake and that becomes your new maintenance budget. This is what’s known as a plateau. To start losing weight again you’d need to reduce calorie intake even further. This is why you shouldn’t reduce your calories by too much at the start as you can get to a point where your maintenance budget is unhealthily low.
Metabolism will not slow down to an appreciable amount. It will be like a few %, which is well within the margin of error for measuring what you’re actually eating.
Your energy requirements will drop as you lose weight, because you physically need to move less weight about. But this is only going to.matter for really big weight loss, like 20lb+. And will still not be a large amount.
In reality it’s far more likely that you’re either just gradually increasing what you’re eating again or you never really lost weight in the first place: you just lost water. If you cut out carbs for a few days you’ll probably lose 2-5lbs of water. But once that’s gone you won’t lose any more without actually going on a calorie deficit.
It’s not that your metabolism slows down in the way you think, this is a bit of a misnomer. If you have 300lbs you need x amount of calories a day to support it. If you drop down to 200lbs you now need y amount. x > y and always will be. So if at 300lbs you’re needing 3,000cal/day to maintain and at 200lbs you need 2,000cal (using round numbers) and you diet at 2,200cal, the closer to 200lbs you get the slower you’ll lose weight and the “more efficient” your body becomes bc you are closer to your maintenance calories needed for the weight you are at. You’ll need to drop down to 2,000cal/day if you stall at 220lbs and wish to get down to 200lbs.
A 35 year old male at 5′ 10″ weighing 200 pounds that does little to no exercise a week needs 2,218 calories a day to maintain his weight. If he wants to lose a pound a week, he needs to drop his calorie intake to 1,718 calories per day.
The problem is after, say, a month, he’s down to 196. Now he only needs 2,196 calories per day to maintain his weight, but he but he needs to cut back his daily to 1,696 to continue his weight loss of one pound per week.
After another month he’s down to 192 pounds. His maintenance need is down to 2,175. If we wants to continue with a pound a week, he needs to cut his daily intake *again* to 1,675.
As you lose weight, your caloric needs drop, so you need to keep adjusting your intake to match. A lot of people don’t do that. They get their initial target number and they’ll lose weight, initially, but eventually their body will reach the point to where their reduced intake will match the maintenance need.
It’s actually a hell of a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the general idea.
There’s two things that happen. Both impact how many calories you burn on a daily basis. Since you lose weight by eating in a deficit of calories (eating less than you burn), these impact how much weight you lose eating a certain number of calories each day.
The first thing is that, as you lose weight, the number of calories you burn daily reduces. Not only does the lower weight mean your body uses less energy to move around, but that fat actually uses some energy to maintain, protect from pathogens, and keep healthy and usable. Overall, when you lose weight, the energy you burn daily goes down.
The second thing is that weight loss isn’t entirely from fat. You also lose muscle, and muscle contributes a significant amount to your daily energy expenditure. This happens unless you specifically prepare for it by lifting weights regularly and eating plenty of protein.
So generally what happens is people lose weight by eating in a deficit, but they don’t account for how that deficit will gradually decrease in size as they lose weight. There are ways around this. You can adjust your deficit to better reflect your new weight as you go, you can take periodic breaks where you eat at maintenance to allow your metabolism to adjust, or you can lift weights/eat protein and promote muscle maintenance while you are in a deficit.
because you’ve reached the size you’re eating for.
If you were 200 and you lost 50 lb by eating the proper amount for a 150 lb person, continuing to eat that same amount will never get you any smaller. if you want to be 125, you’ll have to start eating the right amount for a 125 lb person.
this is why diets “fail”. Narrator: they don’t. the person wants the same diet to do something different
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