Metabolic Leaning; how the body “out smarts” our metabolism: The human body is an amazing and wondrous thing.
It’s like a smart, adaptive system that recognizes changes in the patterns and habits we have. It communicates back and forth with our brains to tell the body when it sees changes being made, and adapts accordingly as they undergo these changes.
Our bodies are like self-learning machines. It’s a survival mechanism; they do it for our own good. Like a road work project; we are a constantly under construction.
But, what does that mean when it comes to our metabolism? When we’re trying to burn off that last stubborn 15 pounds? It may mean that our metabolic patterns are programmed store more, & burn less.
For one thing, in order to keep metabolism going strong, we need be eating regularly & switch up our the foods we eat. When we always eat the same thing, our metabolism will begin to “learn”, and build a tolerance to our habitual food rituals. Slowing down our metabolic rate.
Brian St. Pierre is a fitness coach at Precision Nutrition, and he weighs in on the subject.
In an article that explains how “too much” dieting can actually work against us. Our bodies can literally outsmart themselves.
This is Fascinating…
Here’s a response he gives to one of his most asked questions:
“Is my metabolism damaged?”
Clients ask us this question all the time. (If you’re a trainer or coach, you’ve probably heard it from your clients too.)
Can months or years of dieting do some kind of long-term harm to the way the human body processes food?
Not exactly.
But gaining and losing fat can change the way your brain regulates your body weight.
To understand this answer let’s explore how human metabolism actually works. Then we’ll talk about whether the metabolism can actually be damaged.
Note: This post delves into the science of energy balance, thermodynamics, and metabolic regulation. If you love learning this stuff, feel free to really dig.
If, on the other hand, you want to jump right to the “how to” for weight loss, fat loss, and breaking plateaus, feel free to skip to the summary at the end.
Energy balance: The laws of physics still apply.
You need a certain amount of energy (in the form of calories) to stay alive, as well as to move around. You can get this energy from food, or you can retrieve it from stored energy (e.g. your fat tissue).
In theory:
- If you eat less energy than you expend, you should lose weight.
- If you do the opposite (i.e. eat more energy than you expend), you should gain weight.
Now Brian throws in a curve ball about some commonly overlooked facts about the metabolism.
‘Energy in’ is trickier than you think.
Reason 1: The number of calories in a meal likely doesn’t match the number of calories on the labels or menu.This might sound hard to believe, but it’s true… the way companies (and even the government) come up with calorie and nutrient estimates is incredibly complex, rather imprecise, and centuries-old. As a result, food labels can be off by as much as 20-25 percent.
And even if those food labels were correct:
Reason 2: The amount of energy a food contains in the form of calories is not necessarily the amount of energy we absorb, store, and/or use.
Remember that the food we eat has to be digested and processed by our unique bodies. The innumerable steps involved in digestion, processing, absorption, storage, and use — as well as our own individual physiological makeup — can all change the energy balance game.
So, for instance:
- We absorb less energy from minimally processed carbohydrates, and fats, because they’re harder to digest.
- We absorb more energy from highly processed carbohydrates and fats, because they’re easier to digest. (Think of it this way: The more “processed” a food is, the more digestion work is already done for you.)
For example, research has shown that we absorb more fat from peanut butter than from whole peanuts. The researchers found that almost 38 percent of the fat in peanuts was excreted in the stool, rather than absorbed by the body. Whereas seemingly all of the fat in the peanut butter was absorbed.
In addition:
- We often absorb more energy from foods that are cooked (and/or chopped, soaked, blended) because those processes break down plant and animal cells, increasing their bioavailability.
When eating raw starchy foods (like sweet potatoes), we absorb very few of the calories. After cooking, however, the starches are much more available to us, tripling the number of calories absorbed.
Interestingly, allowing starchy foods to then cool before eating them decreases the amount of calories we can extract from them again. (This is mostly due to the formation of resistant starches).
Finally:
- We may absorb more or less energy depending on the types of bacteria in our gut.
Some people have larger populations of a Bacteroidetes (a species of bacteria), which are better at extracting calories from tough plant cell walls than other bacteria species.
Here’s an interesting example of this whole process at work. Recently, USDA researchers asked test subjects to consume 45 grams (about 1 ½ servings) of walnuts daily for three weeks.
What they found was that, on average, people only absorbed 146 of the 185 calories in the nuts. That’s 79 percent of the calorie content on the label.
In similar research, people also absorbed only 80 percent of the calories in almonds, and 95 percent of the calories in pistachios.
Beyond the average, there were individual differences: Some people absorbed more of the energy in the nuts, while some absorbed less (likely due to the differing populations of bacteria in their large intestines).
In the end, by eating a diet rich in whole, minimally processed foods, the number of calories you absorb can be significantly less than what you expect. Plus they require more calories to digest.
Conversely, you will absorb more calories by eating lots of highly processed foods, plus burn fewer calories in the digestive process. (In addition, highly processed foods are less filling, more energy dense, and more likely to cause overeating.)
Since the number of calories someone thinks they’re consuming could be off by 25 percent (or more), their carefully curated daily intake of 1,600 calories could really be 1,200… or 2,000.
This means:
As you can see, there’s a big margin of error for energy input, even if you’re a conscientious calorie counter. This doesn’t invalidate the Energy Balance Equation. It just means that if you want an accurate calculation, you probably have to live in a fancy metabolic lab.
To sum things all up, not all calories are truly created equal. Your body is a very smart “machine”; and will keep track of the metabolic patterns it undergoes.
For more in depth information; visit www.precisionnutrition.com to get Brian’s full article. Along with 10 things to boost metabolism.
