Metabolism, Thou Sucketh

December 14, 2009

After more than a week on my bare-bones plan of eating, which averaged between 1300-1450 calories my weight actually went up a couple more pounds. It makes no sense. I step on the scales, tell D what the numbers are and both of us just scratch our heads. In case you’re wondering my thyroid is just fine and I’m being accurate on my caloric intake, courtesy of weighing and measuring my food and then entering it into an online database that calculates calories and nutritional information. There’s no logic to what’s going on here aside from the fact that this is something I’ve struggled with for years. My body simply does what it will do and seems to be tenaciously resistant to releasing weight. To say I’ve been experiencing some frustration the last few days would be an understatement.

There’s a theory that’s bantered around that after years of yo-yo dieting, and I have about 40 years of up and down and up, that we actually cause change to our metabolism which makes our bodies resistant to losing weight and it’s the only thing I’m able to come up with that explains what’s going on.

Here’s how the theory goes: Our body takes in calories as energy and metabolism is the process by which those calories are burned to keep our body fully functioning. The calories that aren’t burned as energy are either expended as waste or stored as fat; fat being the body’s warehouse supply for backup energy. In case you’re sent to Mars in a space ship and forget to pack lunch as a for instance. When we reduce our calories through dieting our body isn’t getting enough energy in and so it turns to the back up supply, burning stored fat which leads to weight loss. When we stop dieting and raise the calories we’re taking in again, the body stops tapping from the stored fat and returns to it’s usual process of processing all the energy from what’s incoming and then sending the extra to storage or waste.

It’s a good system. The problem is that when the amount of incoming calories radically fluctuates from scarcity to abundance repeatedly as it does through dieting and binging, dieting and binging, at some point the body makes the calculated decision to reset the metabolic rate to burn fewer calories permanently so it can continue to function consistently regardless of the unpredictability of the incoming energy supply. The effect that has is that to lose weight it takes eating fewer calories to lose the same amount of weight that could have been lost years earlier with more calories and the only way left to raise the reduced rate of energy (calorie) burn is to increase physical activity, forcing the body to convert more incoming calories and stored fat (reserve calories) into energy.

Thus concludes all I know about metabolism 101.

So this is my best guess as to what I’m currently experiencing in terms of my weight. Through years of yo-yo dieting my metabolism has been reset to function at a much lower rate that it once was and because my physical activity has been severely reduced as a result of my surgical recovery time and now that physical limitations are again in place to not aggravate my hernia until it’s repair in another month, my body is needing very few calories to keep going. That leaves me with three options.

1. Feel sorry for myself, throw in the towel and hurry down the street to In-N-Out for a double-double animal style burger. Not an option.
2. Stay with my bare-bones food plan and accept where my weight goes until I can return to my full activity level, allowing me to gradually lose any increase that’s occurred in my weight. While this seems the most sensible route to take, my weight is so unstable that I have genuine concerns as to where my weight would be by the first of March when I would be back to my full activity level.
3. Return to the full liquid fast until I can bring my weight back to the range where I feel it needs to be for optimal health and to achieve a 25 BMI I should weigh between 145-152 pounds. I decided a couple days ago to go with option 3 which reduces my caloric intake to well under 1000 calories and has already caused my body to release about four pounds.

Obviously I don’t want to be fasting. It’s not fun and I don’t like it. Call me crazy but I enjoy eating food. I like sitting down at the table with my adorable little portions of chicken, veggies and rice and spending a few minutes together. But the honest truth is, that after the surgeries I’ve had to remove the excess skin and the new shape that came with them, the anxiety level around shifts in my weight has been heightened off the charts. You know how it is after you’ve worked really hard to stick with a diet that you’ve had some success with and then to come off that diet and see the pounds slowly start to add up again? Multiple your feelings by five and you have some idea of how this feels.

So for now, until the weight settles back down (hopefully within a couple weeks) and I can get my crazy head together (I suspect that might take a little longer), I’m back on the fast. Aside from my whining in this post, I realize there are just some things I’m going to need to learn how to accept in terms of my body, how it responds, how it looks, and where it will ultimately end up leveling off poundage wise. I can only do what I can do and then leave the rest to God and my metabolism to work out together.

Posted in Food Plan, Liquid Fast, Maintaining Weight, Reconstructive Surgery, Weight Loss