With a million companies happy to count your macros or deliver you food with a label for protein, fats, carbohydrates and total Calories, it’s pretty clear that we are paying more attention to what we eat as a society. This is great, but there’s a common misconception that if you want to lose weight, the simple and obvious answer is to eat less food.
While this simple method for weight manipulation may hold true in principle and the short term, in reality many individuals have experienced first hand that it is not always the case. The body is a system of systems and they must all function together to process your food. When any one part of the system is out of place the rest will have to pick up the slack which changes the internal environment of your body. Here are four reasons why simply sticking with a Calories in equals Calories out approach is only one side of the story.
Thermic Effect of Feeding
Some foods require more energy to digest. The dense meaty tissue and fat of a ribeye steak will take more effort to break down than white rice. It’s imperative to chew all your food well in order to break it down appropriately and this goes double for meat and fat. You’ve probably experienced a food coma after eating a huge burger or a rack of ribs from your favorite BBQ place. This is your body working to process that food and get it through your system effectively. Chewing food effectively will help to mitigate some of the required energy for more dense foods and allow your body to process them more efficiently.
Absorption
Intestinal damage can affect nutrient absorption. Whether your intestinal troubles are autoimmune related or you have a parasite, damaged intestines won’t function as effectively as healthy ones. If you consistently have loose stools then you can absorb nutrients very well. Adding more vegetables to your diet is also a great way to help solidify loose stools that has the added bonus of increasing the amount of micronutrients in your diet as well. If you’re eating balanced meals, chewing well and still have issues, you may want to consider an elimination diet to remove possibly irritating foods and get your system back on track.
Sustainability
Extremes of Caloric deficit or excess will change body composition and weight significantly regardless of the aforementioned considerations. If you have a red carpet event and you have to look a certain way, you can crash diet for a week without food and show up “looking” skinny, but this will produce as many health complications as it does pounds lost. The same goes for drinking a gallon of milk a day (GOMAD), you’ll gain some serious weight this way and probably feel terrible in the process. If you’re training and looking to be fit and healthy, these options are not reasonable options.
Hormones
There is a neat little gland in your neck called the thyroid and it is part of the endocrine, or hormone, system. The thyroid controls how much energy your body burns. More food in the system equals a happy thyroid and endocrine system. Less food equals panicked thyroid and a reaction that makes you burn less energy, especially under the stress of an intense exercise program. Once this happens you’ll basically store anything you eat as fat, because your body has convinced itself you are starving and has altered it’s own chemistry to try to survive. Sometimes you have to eat more in order to weigh less.
I find the capabilities of the human body incredible. There are mechanisms within to accommodate basically any contingency that doesn’t outright kill us on the spot. Respecting these mechanisms and honoring basic lifestyle principles will allow you to have more energy, lose or gain weight effectively, and be healthy where eyes can’t see. Simply eating more or less food may not only not get you where you want to be, it can also cause serious problems for you down the road.
