Safety and Health Talks: Losing Weight
“Welcome to Your Brain,” a recent book by two neuroscientists, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, had a very practical suggestion about tricking your brain into helping you lose weight. This week and next’s topic is passing on this helpful advice.
Tricking a Brain to Lose Weight
If your brain works against you when you want to lose weight, then how can you achieve the results you want? Basically, you need to arrange your weight-loss strategy to take your brain’s reactions into account.
Most importantly, that means keeping your metabolic rate as high as possible. It also means finding a strategy that is sustainable. Your brain will always be working toward its own automatically set goals, so any changes you make to your eating and exercise habits will also need to be permanent to remain effective. Temporary changes give temporary results, period. This approach may not sound as glamorous as the latest grapefruit diet, but it does have one substantial advantage: it works.
Your metabolic rate determines how many calories your body burns at rest. Severely low-calorie diets never work in the long run because the very real risk of starvation in our evolutionary past has produced brains that are expert at protecting the body from severe weight loss. One of the main ways that your brain achieves that goal is by slowing down metabolism in times of famine, in some people by up to 45 percent.
If your weight was stable on two thousand calories per day, it may also be stable on twelve hundred calories a day after this metabolic compensation kicks in-only now your life is a lot more difficult. Worse yet, when you increase your food intake, you’re likely to gain weight before your metabolism adjusts back.
Like starvation, sleep deprivation strongly depresses metabolism, so it’s important to get enough sleep if you want to keep your weight down. Stress is another culprit, as the stress hormone corticotropin releasing factor tips the body’s energy balance in favor of conservation.
Metabolism also tends to slow down as you age, which is why people tend to gain weight as they get older, at a rate of about one pound per year.
Exercise is the most effective way to improve this situation, both because the exertion itself triggers your body
to increase its use of energy and because muscles burn more calories at rest than fat does. Exercise can boost metabolism by 20 to 30 percent, and the effect lasts up to fifteen hours. Yoga may be a particularly good exercise because many people find that it also reduces stress.
Weight gain and fat storage increase when humans and other animals are fed a few big meals rather than many small ones. Therefore, you should split your calories into small meals spread out over the entire day rather than eating only once or twice a day.
In one study, people on a laboratory-controlled diet were able to boost their metabolism by eating in the morning-enough to add two hundred to three hundred calories a day to their diets without gaining weight.
This means that (even) a small breakfast pays for itself in metabolic improvement. People who eat the same number of calories gain less weight if they eat in the morning than if they eat in the evening.
Of course, it’s important to make sure that your frequent meals are actually small! Total calorie intake remains a major determinant of weight, whenever you eat.
