“How can I not be losing any weight, I am barely eating a thing”. “I skip breakfast and lunch and just have a salad for dinner”. These are common misconceptions held by people who want to lose fat. I hear them all the time. They are not completely false. If you are eating like a bird, you will lose weight, but the weight loss from fat will be minimal and the weight loss won’t last for long either.
When you dramatically cut your calories back for an extended period of time you are turning your metabolism against you. People who do this end up causing damage to their metabolism and they are unable to achieve any significant fat loss regardless of what they do. I understand the thought process behind it. Logic would dictate that if you cut your food intake back by 500 calories per day, cutting it back by 1000 must be twice as effective, right? The body doesn’t quite work like that.
Our bodies have evolved over millions of years without a lot of change. Humans would go long periods of time without much food. They would hunt, catch their prey, feast, and then go for extended periods with minimal intake. When the body would go through these periods of famine, it would slow down its metabolism and hold onto fat stores in order to survive. Have you ever noticed when you go on a diet, typically the first week or two the results are amazing? You will lose anywhere from 4 to 7 or even 10 lbs? Then in the weeks following you are lucky to lose a pound? This is your body’s survival instincts kicking in.
The good news is that there is a way around it. You can manipulate your metabolism by the foods that you eat. It is referred to as the thermic effect of food, which is the energy expenditure required above your resting metabolic rate due to the cost of processing food through use and storage. Some foods require little to no effort to break down and store and others require a lot. On average, a person uses about 10% of their daily energy expenditure just digesting and absorbing food, but this percentage changes depending on the types of food you eat.
Protein takes the most energy to digest (20-30% of total calories in protein eaten go to digesting it). Next is carbohydrates (5-10%) and then fats (0-3%). If you eat 100 calories from protein, your body uses 20-30 of those calories to digest and absorb the protein. You’d be left with a net 70-80 calories. Pure carbohydrate from processed foods (excluding fruits, vegetables and whole grains) would leave you with a net 90-95 calories, and fat would give you a net 97-100 calories.
That is why high protein diets combined with copious amount of fruits and vegetables are so effective at helping people lose weight. Think protein and fibre. When you eat whole foods like steak, chicken, fish combined with broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, your body turns into a veritable furnace. If you didn’t have enough reasons to avoid processed food when trying to losing weight, add reduced thermal effect of food to the list. Processed food takes less energy to digest and absorb compared to whole foods, so 100 calories of processed food ends up being more net calories than 100 calories of whole food. The next time you decide to lose weight, focus on the foods listed above.