Hitting a plateau in your weight loss journey or being unable to lose weight at all can be incredibly frustrating. Feeling stuck or failing at losing weight can lead to either more extreme dietary measures, or giving up on it all entirely. We’re taught that eating less and exercising more is the tried, tested and only true way to lose weight, and yet so many people can attest to the fact that it can be so much more difficult than that.
When talking about weight loss, we typically think of the conventional “calories in calories out” model. The expectation is that the calories we consume becomes the energy we have available, and the energy we have to burn off in order to lose weight. Burning more calories than we consume equals weight loss progress! Right?
Actually, maybe not.
Over the last decade, research has shown that calories in vs calories out is a flawed assumption of all the ways the human body consumes energy. It assumes that the body is a basic machine that lacks intelligence. What we now know to be true is that there is a vast variety of inputs that significantly impact the ways in which our bodies use and regulate energy. These inputs—including hormones, genetics, gut microbiome health, and more—all play into our body’s ability to manage weight, and can cause our body to become resistant to losing weight.
While there are many factors that can play into weight loss resistance, we will focus on three significant causes; weight loss resistance as protection, nutrition, and the set point theory.
Weight Loss Resistance as a Protection Mechanism
Many hypocaloric yo-yo diets available are based on the conventional caloric input-output model. Medical literature defines yo-yo diets as less than 1400 calories per day, and there are many restrictive dietary options that go lower than that. The issue that can arise when caloric consumption is restricted so strictly is that it can cause the body to go into starvation mode.
Interestingly, when you embark on a hypocaloric diet that flags a starvation response, the body will remember it. If you are genetically predisposed and have the right protection mechanisms in place, your brain will send out a signal that says “hey, this is starvation. I don’t want you to go back to this place, so I’m going to protect us from losing weight going forward.” Starvation mode causes changes to our physiology and our hormones in order to facilitate an environment that is safe guarded against starvation going forward. This results in the body being resistant to future weight loss endeavours.
Nutrition
We live in one of the most over-caloried, under-nutriented societies. There is an overabundance of hyperpalatable foods; foods highly oversaturated in fats, processed carbs, and deep fried. You know the kinds, the ones where the companies boast that you can’t eat just one, and they are correct.
The human body was not designed to have so much access to such excessively rich foods. These hyperpalatable foods are not only calorically dense, but have proven to be highly addictive. Studies show these types of foods are incredibly stimulating to the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain associated with addiction and reward. These hyperpalatable foods are a dangerous mix of being deliciously designed, excessively accessible, and physiologically addictive, a combination that has shown to cause people to frequently fall into patterns of overconsumption.
Nutrition and Insulin Resistance
Through that lens, it can be said that we have too much fuel, not enough nutrients, and we’re not moving our bodies enough. Research shows this trifecta has negative impacts not only when it comes to losing weight, but the overall health and functionality of our bodies as well. The combination of these elements during a small window of our lives can become toxic to our cells and induce a state of insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance is one mechanism our body can develop to protect itself from starvation. When the body is insulin resistant, there are a variety of hormonal changes that occur. Insulin resistance affects cortisol levels and other hormonal stress responses, estrogen, male sex hormones, and causes changes to the mitochondria and other key energy-producing cellular systems. All of these changes and imbalanced hormones can then feed forward and cause insulin resistance in themselves, resulting in the body getting stuck in a self-perpetuating pattern.
Once in this state, weight loss is no longer a simple matter of reducing caloric intake and cutting back on hyperpalatable foods. With insulin resistance and the other mechanisms our bodies use to protect us from entering into starvation mode, the brain loses the capacity to regulate food consumption efficiently and independently. This can take a long time to correct because these measures are intended to protect and ensure the body’s lifelong survival, resulting in long-term weight loss resistance.
Set Point Theory
Set point theory is the concept that our bodies have a weight baseline that is genetically hardcoded into us. It states that we each have a preset weight range our bodies deem as our normal, and uses a series of signals and regulatory systems that work hard to maintain and keep this set weight point steady (Ghoshal, 2020). It determines this number through a variety of different means, including hormones, female sex hormones, stress responses, changes that occurred during puberty, traumas, genetics, and the health of the gut microbiome. The body determines what its preferred weight set point is and will defend it, working in tandem with the brain to either up or down regulate metabolic systems in order to uphold its baseline weight as much as possible.
How to Work with Weight Resistance
While it is exasperating to feel stuck at an impasse when losing weight, approaching it from the perspective that the body is warranted and doing what it is doing in order to protect itself allows us to give our bodies a little grace and best conclude on how to work with it. It’s important to remember that nothing in the body happens by accident. When we understand that weight loss resistance is the body’s way of protecting itself from starvation or a toxic state of overnutrition, it’s easier to determine the most effective means of support for its overall health.
This is why naturopathic medicine uses testing and supplements to assess and understand where a patient is coming in at during their weight loss journey. We’re looking at the different patterns the body has adapted to from a place of protection that can result in your hitting a weight plateau. In this way, we can work with you and your body to best improve the patterns in order to optimize your weight loss progress.
Give Yourself Time
When faced with weight loss resistance, know that there is nothing wrong with you or your body. Your body is not failing you; in truth, it is trying its best to keep you alive. Safely convincing it out of that pattern and teaching it that weight loss does not equal starvation and danger can take time. It’s common for people to go on a low calorie diet or the Keto diet and not lose weight or see results for a month. Understandably, if a person doesn’t see any results for a month they are likely to give up. However, it’s likely that the body is not being given enough time to improve or reset the patterns and foundational symptoms that are causing weight loss resistance.
In Conclusion
Weight loss resistance is a protection mechanism that is causing a lack of interest in the body to adapt and respond to normal stimuli such as caloric reduction, carbohydrate reduction and increased exercise. While there are many factors that can result in the body being resistant to losing weight, three key factors to look into are; the body is trying to protect you against starvation; it has become stuck in a loop of toxic hypernutrients; it is caught in a complex intertwined pattern that has dictated a specific set point it needs to maintain and defend for its ultimate safety and survival.
Giving yourself time, patience and working with naturopathic therapies can help coax the body and brain out of these patterns and help you along safely in your health and weight loss journey.
References
Ghoshal, M. (2020, March). What You Need to Know About Set Point Theory. Retrieved from Healthline: https://www.healthline.com/health/set-point-theory
