Transcription
How do I get good at weight loss maintenance?
All right. So, in order to properly maintain, you have to properly get there. So, properly getting there means that you have to do your best to maintain your lean body mass while you're losing body fat. So, what happens to a lot of people when they diet is they lose a lot of lean body mass along with their fat mass.
Lean body mass? You mean muscle?
Yes. Muscle mass.
Muscle mass along with their fat mass. And so muscle tissue is something very important to keep on the body while you're losing fat because muscle is we can look at it as our metabolically active. Every tissue is metabolically active even even body fat. But muscle tissue specifically is the center of our dietary fuel usage. It is the metabolic engine of the body, if you will. And so if you're losing muscle tissue, you're really losing metabolic leverage while you're losing body fat.
So the way that I infer that is that muscle is very greedy.
It it takes a lot takes up a lot of calories. So if I lose my muscle, when I get when I drop my weight, it's almost like the greedy guy who who sucks up all my calories is no longer there. And so I'm quite likely just to to rebound quite quickly.
That's a great analogy and and it's accurate too. And in fact, there is a phenomenon that in the literature it's called collateral fattening. And that happens when the body senses an energy crisis at the end of a diet where you've lost a bunch of muscle mass. The body senses that, oh my gosh, we just lost a bunch of precious tissue. We have to do whatever we can to get it back. And so your hunger signals ramp up and your body kind of behaviorally and even metabolically does what is necessary for you to feed that back as soon as possible. And this does not necessarily happen certainly not to that kind of magnitude if you keep your muscle mass while you're losing body fat. you don't experience this collateral fattening type of phenomenon where people just rebound like crazy because their appetite is out of control at the end of the diet.
So the way that you preserve muscle mass during the fat loss process is a couple things. So you have to make sure that your rate of weight loss isn't indicative of something that's too quick. So about a half a percent to a full percent of your body weight lost per week is as fast as you really want to go. So roughly a pound a week. uh some people who start off heavier, okay, 2 pounds a week is fine at the very beginning, but you generally don't want to lose more than 1% of your total body weight per week because then that increases the chances that you're losing an undue amount of muscle mass along with your fat mass. And so if you can in essence control the weight loss rate, then you will keep your lean mass. Now the other two things that need to be going on at the same time are you need to be resistance training and you need to be consuming enough protein.
Strength training protein.
Enough protein you got resistance training and then you have sort of a top speed limiter on how much weight that you lose per week. And 1% loss awake 1% loss a week is spectacular actually for most people. Even a pound a week, even half a pound a week, you're looking at like in two years you lost 50 pounds. Most people took like two decades to put on that 50 pounds.
So, you actually don't want to lose weight too quickly or else you are susceptible to rebound.
It is going to come off quickly. If you have a lot of weight to lose, it'll come off quickly at the beginning. So, for example, uh somebody who is in a state of obesity, let's say they weigh 250 lbs and let's say they're losing two 2 and a half pounds a week at the beginning of the program, that's fine. But on average, on average, you you would want to look at roughly a pound a week is a good benchmark. And I still would not frown upon or scoff at a half a pound a week for certain cases. And we can talk about some of those stubborn cases. Like on the topic of plateaus, for example, I had a client uh I I'm sure she doesn't mind being named, she's a great person, Pam Pam Gresock. She's a veteran coach in the space. Uh she's permenopausal, so she's in her her 40s, and she wanted to lose what we calculated out to be 8 pounds of fat. and she stored the majority of it where she didn't want it was around the midsection and I had it in mind that okay this is somebody who's pmenopausal so there's going to be a lower rate of progress going on this is somebody who is highly trained so she doesn't have a lot more muscle to put on that would give her some you know some extra in quotes metabolic like leverage for the whole process of improving body composition. So she's highly trained, per menopausal, wants to lose 8 pounds of fat, which would represent the final 8 pounds. Sort of that that pushing the envelope. Knowing those three things, I knew that this is going to be a difficult and slowgoing process. So whereas I would normally have somebody expect roughly or at least gun for a pound a week loss for Pam. It was more like, are you going to be okay with one to two pounds per month? Like if we can get rid of 1 to two pounds of body fat per month, I would be happy with it and I think you should be happy with it. And so I convinced her of that. And with her wanting to lose 8 pounds, I think it helps to give people a visual of what a certain amount of weight loss looks like. So, coincidentally, a gallon a gallon jug if you fill it with butter, that's 8 pounds.
And so, I had her visualize this 8 pound jug. And um I also had her do a butter visualization, too. So, um, a standard stick of butter is 4 ounces. So, four sticks of butter is one pound. And, uh, in her case, she wanted to lose, well, she wanted to lose 8 pounds. So, that's 32 sticks of butter that would be removed from her body at the end of the dieting cycle.
Is that what this is here? What is this?
That is 10 lbs of butter. This is an amazing freaking visual. And this is because you asked about diet breaks as a tool for people achieving long-term weight loss or just breaking through plateaus or managing plateaus. So every 5 to 10 pounds that somebody loses in a dieting cycle is high time for a diet break. The way you can define a diet break, put some parameters on it. So it it's what I call non yolo maintenance. So you take off the rules, take off the restrictions, but you're not eating with sheer abandon. You're just relaxing the diet. You take a week off the diet either every four to eight weeks while you're dieting or you take a week off of the diet every 5 to 10 pounds that you lose. And the sound of five to 10 pounds seems like, oh, that's nothing.
But no, it's a milestone.
This is 10 pounds.
Yes.
That's crazy.
10 lbs of of butter off the body. So, yeah, every time you you lose 10 pounds, it's 5 to 10 pounds in in my experience is high time to take a diet break to just alleviate the mental and the physical fatigue of dieting. And that's one of the tactics that you can use for a long-term adherence to a plan. On the topic of plateaus, you can when you're dieting, you will hit a point where the plateau periods or the maintenance phases are going to be longer than the dieting phases. I think that that's ideal to be able to hit that point for a long-term weight loss goal. And so it's a lot easier or at least a lot less intimidating for somebody to know that they're going to be dieting for 4 to 8 weeks at a time in between a let's say a 2 to 3 month maintenance phase.
What about fasting? Do you think that fasting is because a lot of people talk about this thing called autophagy where if you fast for I don't know 48 hours your body switches into the state of autophagy where it starts to heal and repair itself. Are you a fan of fasting for weight loss or for autophagy or other things?
For the control of calories in fasting is legit and it's also legit for it. It actually works a as a as one of the options for dieting. There just has been a massive accumulation of studies showing that it works great. So the intermittent fasting variants we have one one we talked about earlier timerestricted eating and we've got every other day fasting and then the other third major variant would be twice weekly fasting or the 52 type of model. And then you have like consecutive day fasting type of models as well which are less studied because there's just more risk involved in them and it's tough to you know incur that risk in research. When you bring up autophagy, that's where I kind of have to push back on um not on your your mentioning of it specifically, but just in general. People will say or will make claims that yeah, autophagy and we can say that we can explain autophagy as a way that the body gets rid of uh parts of damaged cells. It's an important process within the body and it is a catabolic process or a breakdown process. But the thing is it happens in a caloric deficit regardless of whether fasting is involved or not.
Really?
Yes. You maintain hypocloric conditions. Autophagy ramps up. um you can have a linear hypocchloric model or a nonlinear or intermittent hypocaloric model and you'll get similar degrees of autophagy if you match the caloric deficit by the end of the week. Now the other interesting thing about autophagy is that you can ramp up autophagy through exercise and not only that but both major types of exercise will increase autophagy. So resistance training increases autophagy. Endurance aerobic type training increases autophagy. So, if you want to in quotes chase autophagy, then doing it through intermittent fasting or just going through prolonged periods of not eating can be a double-edged sword. Whereas the autophagy increases through exercise, they almost don't have a downside. And so, um, a lot of times with intermittent fasting, it can be a great tool for people who need to lose excess body weight. But what I'm seeing in the community is people thinking that intermittent fasting is something that is necessary to do regardless of your body fat level. That it's either necessary or beneficial. And that's not actually true per per the research. There's there's a one study in particular that looked at men who are already lean. And I believe this was by Templeton and colleagues where they compared a linear dieting model with an every other day fasting model.
What does that mean? Every other day fasting. So they took 24 hours off.
Yes. Yeah. So it was Yep. every other day. And then the same deficit by the end of the by the end of the week between the two groups. And the intermittent group actually lost more lean body mass than the linear caloric deficit group.
They lost more lean body.
They lost more lean body mass.
So they lost more weight.
More muscle.
Lost more muscle.
Mhm. Yeah. And so that gives us a hint that fasting is great until it isn't because you've achieved what you needed to achieve. And so then it just kind of becomes a tool. It it it's always just a tool to help people control calories. In one of the beautiful things about fasting and whether it's timerestricted eating or whether it's some sort of variant of alternate day fasting or twice a week fasting is that it works in research regardless of whether people are meticulously tracking things or not. And so that that can be a boon for individuals who don't necessarily like to micromanage their stuff. But for people who are trying to maximize retention of lean mass while they're pushing the envelope of uh fitness, uh it can definitely be a double-edged sword once you're already lean.
But if I do want to maximize the benefits of autophagy, the best way to do that is fasting versus just calorie restriction. I'm assuming.
We don't know what the optimal level of autophagy is that would actually confer health benefits. We don't know what that threshold is. And there's different ways that people try to measure autophagy. It's very hard to correlate certain levels of autophagy with certain certain degrees of disease prevention. We we're not there yet. Um, I don't think I I think big picture-wise I think that autophagy is an algorithm running in the background that is more of a bystander type of thing than a driver. Simil sim similar to insulin and glucagon. So the insulin and glucagon axis works when you feed versus when you're fasting. So glucagon levels go up.
What's glucagon?
Glucagon is a hormone that mobilizes fuel stores in the absence of food, in the absence of calories. And autophagy is similar in that regard. And I think that a focus on pushing autophagy is sort of missing the forest for the trees. Because if we were to push autophagy to its end, then we could go all the way to a phenomenon called autotosis, which is runaway cell death, which happens in starvation in some cases. And so I think that we need to focus on other things like how do we maintain a certain body fat percentage while maintaining a certain physical activity level while maintaining a certain dietary pattern. I think that it's those things that are much more productive to target than seeing how far can we push autophagy before potentially going into runaway cell death.
I was looking at the the benefits of this thing they call autophagy and it says there the b the proven likely benefits are cellular cleanup. So repairs damaged proteins and organels. I believe improving cell efficiency, metabolic health, improves insulin sensitivity, neurop protection, heart and muscle quality, maintains mitochondria, helps adapt to training and oxidative stress, immune tuning and longevity. there's sort of strong animal evidence I believe around the longevity component but they the research that I was reading talked about how it can back back backfire because um tumors may use autophagy to survive um and some treatments for established cancers aim to inhibit it and if you overdo fasting as you said in the study you cited you can lose muscle which is not great and be fatigued etc. Um there is a bit of a trend I think with people doing a lot of water fasts and stuff like that quite periodically. I think it's rising even sort of juice fasts and stuff like that. What's your take on those types of fasts?
I'm not a big fan, Stephen. Uh I think that the cycle that people go through, at least in the developed world, is that they go through the year then November comes around and then the holidays hit. They overdo it from November to through December all the way up to the end of the year and they're like, "Oh boy, I have 10 to 20 pounds that I want to lose." And then they just use these sort of fasts and these detoxes to crash off the bad decisions of the previous few months. And then the cycle repeats annually. So, I think that it's a much healthier approach for people to secure and reinforce the right habits through the entirety of the year instead of um jumping on the fast to get rid of the the the holiday binges.
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