00:00:00
Fat loss resistance is very often not just a willpower problem or even purely a calorie
00:00:06
problem.
00:00:06
It's a signaling problem across your gut.
00:00:09
Your hormones, your stress, all of which are interconnected.
00:00:13
Two people can eat the exact same diet and get completely different results.
00:00:18
This is also why fasting protocols pulled from a podcast or an influencer that are just
00:00:23
applied blindly can help one person and actually harm another.
00:00:28
The variable isn't just willpower or discipline.
00:00:31
It's actual physiology, and you can't know your physiology without looking directly.
00:00:36
Welcome to Health Decoded, your number one source for real health information with your
00:00:41
host, doctor Alessi and Matt Tack.
00:00:47
If you've dieted before, and I mean you've really dieted, counted calories, done the
00:00:52
cardio, done everything you were told to do, and the weight just kept coming back, and maybe
00:00:58
even sometimes more than before, I need you to hear this and hear this clearly.
00:01:03
It wasn't because you didn't have willpower and you failed in that regard.
00:01:07
That was your metabolism doing exactly what it's designed to do.
00:01:11
And so, I'm going to walk you through why the conventional approach to fat loss, which is eat
00:01:18
less, move more, actually works against you over time.
00:01:21
We're going to talk about metabolic adaptation, why your thyroid is probably even involved if
00:01:27
your labs come back normal, and why the fix isn't eating less.
00:01:31
It's a process called reverse dieting and most people have never even heard of it because it's
00:01:36
the opposite of everything the diet industry sells.
00:01:39
This is Health Decoded.
00:01:41
I'm Doctor.
00:01:42
Alessi.
00:01:43
Let's start with what actually happens in your body during a calorie restricted diet because
00:01:48
almost nobody explains this.
00:01:51
Your body doesn't know the difference between intentional diet and famine.
00:01:56
It has one system for detecting low energy intake and this is an ancient part of our
00:02:01
evolution.
00:02:02
It evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to protect you from starvation, not to help you
00:02:07
fit into your summer dress.
00:02:09
So, when you drop your calories, let's say for example, you go from maintaining on 2
00:02:15
calories a day down to 1, your body registers that deficit within days It starts
00:02:22
making adjustments.
00:02:23
This is called adaptive thermogenesis, or more simply, metabolic adaptation.
00:02:29
Here's what that looks like physiologically.
00:02:32
Your resting metabolic rate drops, and not just from the weight loss itself.
00:02:37
Studies on this, going back to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and more recently, on
00:02:42
the biggest loser contestants show that metabolic rate drops beyond what would be
00:02:48
predicted by body weight and composition change alone.
00:02:51
Your body is actively becoming more efficient, burning fewer calories to do the same tasks.
00:02:58
Your thyroid function shifts, specifically your body reduces conversion of T4 to the active
00:03:04
thyroid hormone T3, and it actually increases a conversion to what's called reverse T3, which
00:03:10
is an inactive, metabolically inactive version of T3 thyroid hormone.
00:03:16
Your labs might still show normal on a TSH, which is why many people get told that their
00:03:22
thyroid is fine when their metabolic function is clearly not fine.
00:03:26
Because TSH is not the entire story.
00:03:29
If we're not looking at free T3, free T4, and reverse T3, we're missing the whole picture.
00:03:36
Your hunger hormones also shift against you.
00:03:38
Leptin, which is the hormone that signals satiety, it drops.
00:03:43
Ghrelin, the hormone that drives hunger, rises.
00:03:47
This isn't just in your head.
00:03:48
You are biochemically hungrier during and after a diet than you were before it.
00:03:54
And your non exercise activity, which is the fidgeting, the extra steps, the unconscious
00:03:59
movement throughout your day, this drops without you noticing.
00:04:03
Your body is finding calories to save everywhere it can.
00:04:07
So put that all together and here's the outcome.
00:04:10
Someone finishes a crash diet, goes back to eating normally, and they gain all the weight
00:04:15
back.
00:04:16
Oftentimes plus more, because their metabolic rate is now lower than it was before they
00:04:21
started.
00:04:22
They might have lost weight, they might have hit their goal for their wedding, but they put
00:04:27
their body into a slower metabolic state that when they stop that diet, their hunger
00:04:32
signaling is now dysregulated.
00:04:34
Nobody told them any of this, and that's why the failure rate of conventional dieting, it is
00:04:39
what it is.
00:04:41
It's not a discipline problem.
00:04:42
It's a predictable physiological response that you're not taught to manage.
00:04:47
So, let me tell you about, this is a patient pattern I see constantly in our clinic.
00:04:52
I'm going to use an example of a patient.
00:04:55
She's not a specific person, but this is a composite of what walks through the door
00:04:59
multiple times a month.
00:05:01
So, let's say Sarah is in her late thirties, she's dieted on and off for fifteen years.
00:05:06
Every diet works at first, she loses 15, maybe 20, maybe 30 pounds, But every time, within a
00:05:12
year, it's back.
00:05:14
By the time she came to see us, she tells us she's eating less than 1 calories a day and
00:05:19
she's gaining weight.
00:05:21
She's exhausted, she's cold all the time, her hair is starting to thin, and she's very
00:05:25
convinced that something is wrong with her.
00:05:27
Something is wrong, but it's not what she thinks.
00:05:30
When we run a comprehensive lab panel, her free T3 is low normal range, her reverse T3 is now
00:05:36
elevated, and her resting metabolic rate, which we test directly rather than just estimating,
00:05:42
is significantly below what her age, height, and weight should predict.
00:05:47
Her body has spent fifteen years learning to survive on less.
00:05:52
Every diet has made this worse, not better.
00:05:54
The standard advice she's been given, which is eat less, move more, was the exact opposite of
00:05:59
what she really needed.
00:06:01
This is not a rare case.
00:06:02
This is a predictable result of chronic dieting.
00:06:05
It's why so many of you that are listening have felt like your body's broken, but it's not
00:06:10
broken, it's adapted.
00:06:12
If anything, it's doing what it was designed to.
00:06:15
So, if undereating causes this problem, the fix has to address the cause to make sense.
00:06:22
This is not just add another restrictive diet on top of already a suppressed metabolism.
00:06:28
This is where the concept of reverse dieting comes in.
00:06:31
I want to be very precise about what it actually is because it can get oversimplified
00:06:36
online into just eat more and you'll be fine, which isn't quite right either.
00:06:42
Reverse dieting is the deliberate gradual increase of caloric intake, typically in small
00:06:48
increments by maybe 50 to 100 calories a week, focused primarily on protein and complex
00:06:54
carbohydrates with the specific goal of restoring metabolic rate before pursuing
00:06:59
further fat loss.
00:07:01
And here's why gradual matters because if Sarah went from the 1 calories to 2 calories
00:07:07
overnight, she would gain fat rapidly because her body has spent over a year adapted to
00:07:13
running on very little and this sudden surplus is going to get stored, not spent.
00:07:18
Her body has to relearn how to utilize this energy.
00:07:21
So, the gradual increase gives her metabolism room to begin to upregulate, to essentially
00:07:28
relearn that food is available and it's safe to increase our output again.
00:07:33
What we're watching for during this process is the resting metabolic rate should climb, energy
00:07:39
should get better, sleep should get better, and for women, if the cycle has been irregular,
00:07:44
they often begin to normalize.
00:07:46
This can take, depending on how long and how severely someone's been under eating, anywhere
00:07:52
from two to six months before we even start talking about a fat loss phase again.
00:07:58
I know that's not what people want to hear.
00:08:00
Nobody to hear, we need to increase your food and wait months before we address the weight.
00:08:05
But here's the reality, if we skip this step and just put someone back on another caloric
00:08:10
deficit, we're going to be rebuilding a broken foundation.
00:08:13
The diet might work again short term, but it's going to fail long term for the exact same
00:08:18
reasons it failed before.
00:08:20
Why would we repeat the same cycle?
00:08:22
This is also where energy systems matter.
00:08:25
And I want to touch on this briefly because it explains why reverse dieting is not just about
00:08:30
weight, it's about function.
00:08:31
Your body has three primary energy systems.
00:08:34
The Phosphagen system, which is for short bursts, zero to nine second high output
00:08:39
activity.
00:08:40
The Glycolytic system, which is for moderate intensity efforts, and the oxidative system or
00:08:46
aerobic engine for sustained long activity.
00:08:50
Chronic under eating is going to impair all three of these, but especially the oxidative
00:08:54
system because that's the system most dependent on thyroid function and mitochondrial health.
00:09:01
This is why chronically dieted patients report they used to be able to do things they no
00:09:07
longer can.
00:09:08
Climbing stairs without getting winded, doing a workout that used to be easy.
00:09:12
That's not aging.
00:09:13
In many cases, that's metabolic adaptation and it is reversible.
00:09:18
If you recognize yourself in any of what I've just been describing the chronic dieting,
00:09:23
plateau, worse results despite eating less and less, feeling fatigued or cold, hair thinning,
00:09:30
irregular cycles if you're a woman.
00:09:32
The instinct is always to just diet harder, cut more, add more cardio, but that's the worst
00:09:37
thing you can do in this state.
00:09:39
And it's why so many people end up worse off a year later than when they started.
00:09:44
The actual first step is an assessment, not another diet.
00:09:47
You need to know what is your actual resting metabolic rate right now, not estimate it from
00:09:53
a formula.
00:09:54
What do your thyroid markers actually look like beyond TSH?
00:09:58
What's happening with your hunger and stress hormones?
00:10:00
Without that information, you're just guessing and you've probably already spent years
00:10:04
guessing.
00:10:06
In the next two episodes of this mini series, we're going to build on this.
00:10:10
Episode two, we're going to get into the gut and hormone connection, and where fasting fits
00:10:15
into all of this, including some very direct talk about who should and should not be
00:10:20
fasting, especially women because there's a lot of bad advice out there.
00:10:25
Episode three, we're going talk about the piece almost nobody focuses on which is building
00:10:29
metabolically active muscle as your long term fat loss strategy.
00:10:34
If this episode described your last ten years of dieting, I want you to sit with that.
00:10:38
I want you to really think on it, not panic.
00:10:41
Your body isn't failing you.
00:10:43
It's responding exactly the way it's supposed to and the path forward looks different than
00:10:48
what you've tried before, but that's the point.
00:10:51
I want to thank you for tuning in today to Health Decoded.
00:10:54
If you want to know what your metabolism is actually doing right now, not just estimated,
00:10:59
but tested, that's exactly what we do at Ascend Functional Health.
00:11:03
There's a link in the show notes.
00:11:05
You can book a discovery call with me or a member of my team, and we can dig into every
00:11:10
single piece that we talked about in this episode.
00:11:12
Thank you for tuning in, and I'll see you on episode two.
00:11:17
Thank you for tuning in to Health Decoded, where we break down the truth about all things
00:11:21
health and empower you to take charge of your well-being.
00:11:25
If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with
00:11:30
someone who needs to hear this.
00:11:32
For more resources, personalized support, or to have your questions answered live on the show,
00:11:37
visit Ascend Functional Health and head to the contact page to connect with us directly.
00:11:42
Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered, and remember, your health is in your hands.