Keep the Weight Off!

Part 1: Prevent Excess Fat Accumulation after Dieting

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New Year New You

As the 2022 holiday season concludes, a long list of goals for 2023 start to gain traction. Among them, losing weight is both popular yet extremely difficult. It takes months to adjust your appetite and pick up valuable training information, and it takes even longer for the results to appear. With all the hardships that come with losing weight, it still remains the best way to increase your lifespan and quality of life.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the weight loss journey is the post-diet weight gain. While dieting, we restrict calories below that of caloric expenditure, resulting in a caloric deficit. Forcing your body to burn fat cells for fuel. To the average person, this is weight loss on the surface. However, after several months of dieting, calories must be continuously decreased to account for metabolic homeostatic processes, thus leading to a plateau in the weight loss journey. While at the plateau stage, it is oftentimes recommended to increase calories slightly, therefore, allowing the body to increase metabolism and caloric expenditure. During this post-diet phase, weight gain can be extremely discouraging to anyone and often results in uncontrollable eating and weight gain, thus reverting to progress back to none.

This “Yo-Yo” dieting is seen as a lack of discipline or motivation, thus casting yet another shadow of hate onto an individual who’s in a biological war. In fact, there are several hormonal factors at play which impacts people differently. Therefore, a healthy body weight is the body weight most sustainable while still not increasing risk for disease. For example, person A has great health, found by medical examinations, but has a BMI of 25. According to classic BMI, it deemed this person overweight, yet when person A tries to lose fat, they end up starving, not enjoying life, and eventually binge eating. In this scenario, person A while dieting is miserable, less social, and creates a health catastrophe in binge eating. At this point, person A is healthy at a BMI slightly above the universal standard.

This example is relatable for many people. However, getting blood work and medical examinations to test your health is required. If you need to lose weight because of your health decline, dieting comes in all shapes and sizes. Be sure to research the best ways to limit hunger or find a professional to optimize weight loss. Also, being under the guidance of an accountability coach can help make the journey more efficient. Learn more about coaching here.

Keep the Weight Off

To prevent sudden weight gain during a plateau period, a diet high in protein is great practice. Not only will protein consumption significantly improve muscle maintenance during the dieting phase, but prevents excess fat accumulation during the plateau/re-feeding stage. A recent article published in nature metabolism highlights the importance of a high protein diet and preventing fat accumulation after a period of caloric restriction.

To briefly highlight the mechanism revealed in the keystone article, they fed mice a high protein diet after a period of caloric restriction. Resulting in significantly less fat when calories were increased to back to baseline compared to mice fed a variety of diets. The authors showed that the high protein diet prevents fat accumulation via inhibiting/preventing Lactobacillus growth, a species of bacteria responsible for intestinal lipid absorption. By preventing lipid absorption, fewer calories are absorbed into the bloodstream, preventing excess fat accumulation.

This study contains practical information, such that a high protein diet is beneficial when trying to maintain weight loss resulting from a short period of caloric restriction.

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How much Protein?

Proper protein consumption can be very tricky. First, tracking nutrition is vital to monitoring your health. Apps like cronometer make this first step extremely simple. By putting in all of your foods, you can see which vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients you are missing. This is vital for tracking protein consumption because too much protein may negatively impact longevity while too little protein will cause muscle loss and other problems. 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight seems to be an appropriate amount of protein that does not sacrifice longevity nor muscle mass. A 200 pound (90.7 kg) male would need to take in 144 grams of protein to meet this recommendation.

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