March 24, 2010
Stuck on Fill: The Faulty Metabolism Myth, Part Two
By Barbara Berkeley
In my last post, I tried to debunk the idea that those who have trouble losing weight have something wrong with their metabolisms. Even if that information struck a chord with you, you might have been left wondering the following: “Your explanation tells me why I can’t lose weight, but what about my tendency to gain if I do so much as look at a doughnut? If I don’t have a damaged metabolism, why do I gain weight so easily ?”
When I suggest that most overweight people have normal metabolisms, I’m often met with angry and dismissive responses. Of course there’s something wrong, I’m told. Actually, I completely agree. There is something very wrong, it’s just not metabolism.
Part of the answer lies in our misuse of the term “metabolism .” This word has become something of a catch-all that is employed by just about everyone without much of a definition. What’s generally meant by “I have a slow metabolism” is “There is something really wrong with the way my body reacts to food.” Since we don’t have a specific explanation for what that “something” is, we tend to chalk it up to metabolism.
In medical terms, metabolism refers to the number of calories your body burns each day. These calories are expended by your daily life processes, things like breathing, circulating your blood, digesting, and the microscopic work of cells. Calories are also burned when you move around. It takes fuel to to walk, run, shiver, blink and so on. If we measure only the calories that are burned in basic work, we are measuring Resting Metabolic Rate. When we add on the calories burned with physical activity, we are calculating Total Metabolic Rate. Most studies of overweight and obese people confirm that, far from burning fewer calories, they actually burn more calories than normal weight people. In the graph below, from The Obesity Society, you can see this demonstrated.
Why would this be? First, because large people have more mass that needs to be carried each time they move. They therefore burn more calories in doing so. An SUV is going to burn more gas than a Mini Cooper. Secondly, calories are burned more actively by muscle tissue and overweight people have more muscle. This muscle is gained when new fat tissue is manufactured. It provides the scaffolding that holds up that tissue. The greater muscle mass is responsible for a larger daily calorie burn.
So, for most overweight people, there certainly is a problem with the way their bodies react to food, but it’s rarely “metabolism” as we know it. It’s actually more of a food partitioning problem, a derangement in the way the body stores food calories. For lack of a better descriptor, let’s call this “Stuck on Fill.”
When we are confronted with food, our body has a choice as to what to do with the calories. It can burn them (generally by sending them to muscles and other active tissues) or it can store them by filling up the fat cells. This is meant to be a subtle balancing act that works perfectly without our knowledge or intervention. (I’ve written about this before in a previous post on IBM.) Every element that we take into the body is controlled by a similar balance mechanism. Unless some piece of the balance machinery gets broken, the mechanism will continue to work seamlessly.
Here is an example. A huge overdose of potassium can stop your heart, but you can eat bananas and other high potassium foods day and night without being endangered. A silent mechanism is measuring, balancing and correcting your blood potassium from moment to moment. The ability of the body to control all of its elements within a narrow range is called homeostasis. Our bodies have insistent demands regarding balance. Homeostasis keeps us alive. But one of the components of the balance mechanism for potassium is the kidney. The body relies on the kidney to either hold back or excrete more potassium depending on levels in the blood. If the kidney fails, potassium balance also fails. Suddenly, we humans have to take action by measuring and checking potassium and by adding medicines to control it.
The evidence for a homeostatic mechanism regarding weight is all around us. Just look at the people you know who have never been heavy. With few exceptions, they do not monitor calories or record exercise minutes. How is it that they can weigh the same on December 31st as they did on January 1st? The answer must be that the body is silently and elegantly making decisions that keep weight stable. It is burning more calories on one day and filling the fat cells on another. Just enough to keep things steady.
What about the easy weight gainer? If we think of the burn/fill mechanism as a switch, it is my contention that they are “stuck on fill .” Their bodies have lost the ability to efficiently burn calories and instead are sending mostly everything into fat storage. This may look like a slow metabolism, but it’s actually quite a different problem.
Since insulin is the mega-hormone that deals with burning and storing calories, it makes sense to look for a failure there. What we know about insulin dovetails neatly with the “stuck on fill” hypothesis. We know that it is very common for people on western diets to develop insulin resistance, a condition in which the muscles stop listening to the signals sent by this hormone. Essentially, the burn part of the equation gets shut down. We also know that people who are insulin resistant are still able to make a lot of fat. Essentially, things are tilted toward fill. Insulin resistance develops with increasing age and gets worse as people get fatter. The heavier you are, the more resistant, the less you can burn. Eventually, your lever gets stuck on fill, and most food is going into storage. It’s a vicious cycle unless you can figure out a way to unstuck the switch.
So how do you fix the problem? By looking at the elements of the mechanism that are broken and the parts that are amenable to repair. Here’s what you can do…and these fixes really do work:
1. If we force the body to lose weight, it becomes less insulin resistant. Once insulin starts working properly, there is a better burn/fill ratio. (But to lose weight, you must be tough and consistent. See my last post).
2. Exercise helps sensitize the muscles so they can “hear” insulin better. It gives us a hedge against resistance and is very important, particularly for maintainers.
3. (And most controversial). It is my firm belief that the switch gets weakened and finally stuck when insulin is asked to overperform day after day, and year after year. As most of my readers know, I believe that our obesity epidemic comes from eating a diet we weren’t genetically designed to consume. The largest difference between our modern diet and our ancient one is the huge load of insulin-requiring foods that we eat. In order to keep a damaged insulin switch oiled and supple, we need to cut back on these foods. The amount of cut-back has some individual variation, but the foods we need to be concerned about are starches and sugars, including bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereals, grains, honey, syrups and sugars of all kinds. If you find yourself becoming “stuck on fill” after a weight loss, look to a reappearance in your diet of these foods.
Why am I making a big deal about all of this? Because there is nothing you can do about a “slow metabolism .” It’s simply something you’ve inherited and there’s nothing to do but curse your bad luck. On the other hand, if your problem is a stuck switch, you’ve got some exciting repair work to do. Loosen up that switch by vastly taking the load off insulin, forcing your body to lose pounds, and exercising faithfully and vigorously on most days. Let me know how it goes.
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