Weight Loss
Weight loss is something I’m asked to help with frequently. There is considerable misinformation and misconception about the mechanism of weight loss, which is actually very simple: eat less and move more. However, this isn’t enough information for most people to have success with.
The reason for excess weight is the law of conservation of mass. If you take in a number of calories and expend that same number, your body weight will remain constant. If you expend more or less calories, you will lose or gain weight at the rate of one pound of body weight per 3,600 calories. Prior weight loss techniques tried, in vain, to come up with strategies to raise your metabolic rate (the rate at which your body expends calories) to shed excess pounds. These attempts were both ineffective and harmful to overall health. The problem lay in the apeset, a part of the phylogenetically old region of the brain known as the thalamus, or your “crocodile” brain. This system is regulated by your endocrine system, which is itself controlled by the release of hormones into your blood stream when you eat food. As your digestion takes place, your intestines and other parts of your body release hormones that bind chemically in your brain to tell your body you’re not hungry any more.
The problem is, this process takes about twenty minutes. This would have been beneficial early in our evolution, when, as hunter-gatherers, we needed to travel many miles over several hours just to gather enough food to maintain even a small average body weight. Now, with an abundance of calorie-rich foods easily available, we are able to eat three to four times our daily caloric requirements in under ten minutes. By the time our appetite catches up and we feel satiated, our caloric requirements have been vastly over supplied. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that our brain registers high-caloric, high-fat foods as beneficial to our system. This also stems from our evolutionary past, when the comsumption of the excess calories found in high-caloric foods could mean the difference between life and death, especially as winters approached.
Now, thanks to Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the like, you can sit at one quick, convenient, and tasty meal and exceed your daily requirement for calories. Your body converts the excess calories into fat as stored energy for famine that never comes. The problem for modern humans is that this increased body mass significantly increases the risk for for a multitude of life-shortening diseases. Obesity is fast becoming the most serious health consideration facing Americans.
There is a simple answer to this mismatch of modern abundance and ancient physiology: Eat half of your intended meal. Take the other half and place it aside for thirty minutes. If, after thirty minutes, you’re still hungry, then, in fact, your body really needs those extra calories, and you can eat some more. The majority of the time, however, after thirty minutes, your apiset will have registered that you’re full and your appetite will have abated. If you make a habit of this, your body will eventually draw from its unnecessary excess to make up the deficit of uneaten calories and your body weight will slowly come down.
If you have weight reduction goals, it is best to monitor your weight at least once a week to make sure you’re losing between one and two pounds per week. If you lose too quickly, your body will develop strong cravings for excess food intake, and your weight will rebound. If you’re not losing quickly enough, then you need to further decrease your food consumption every meal, until you are losing at the correct rate. Once you have reached your target weight, you can use a system I call “bracketing” to maintain your new body weight. In essence, you choose a “ceiling” weight that you will not allow your body to go over before making an immediate correction. Usually this is a few pounds over your target weight. For example, let’s say you’ve chosen 160 pounds as your target weight, and have attained it. Your “ceiling” weight would then be 164 pounds. As you continue to monitor your weight weekly, if you find yourself approaching 164 pounds, make the necessary steps in your daily eating to correct this trend. After a while, you’ll gain a natural sense of your own weight and eating habits and weekly monitoring on the scale will not be necessary.