60: Body Weight Set Point and Busting Through Metabolic Plateaus
Picture your body weight set point like a thermostat. Your body gets comfortable at a certain number and works to keep you there by turning on and off hormones to keep it stable. This is great when you’re at your healthiest weight, but what if your set point, your “temperature setting,” has crept up to a place that is no longer comfortable for you? How do you get your thermostat to blow the right hormonal “air” for a better target weight?
Check out this week’s podcast as we talk about the concepts and strategies that can shift your set point and bust through metabolic plateaus!
EPISODE 60: Body Weight Set Point and Busting Through Metabolic Plateaus
SHOW NOTES
(0:00) Intro
(0:44) Welcome back to the club!
Today’s Topic: Body Weight Set Point - Busting through Metabolic Plateaus
Body weight set point is the weight your body tends to hover at and likes to stay at, give or take 3-5 lbs. like your body weight set point may be 150 pounds and you may fluctuate from 148 to 153 but generally speaking you seem to stay in that range.
Ideally your set point is at a healthy weight for you and the idea is that the body works to keep you there. The problem comes in when your set point starts creeping up and your body considers that your new norm and works to keep you at that set point. That’s when you feel like your weight won’t budge and you can’t bust through that 3-5 lb buffer range.
I want to help you understand why that can happen, some of the mechanisms at play and what you can do about it.
Your body is always trying to achieve homeostasis - which is a fancy way of saying a balanced state.
One of the mechanisms it’s trying to keep stable and balanced is your energy, the fuel that keeps your body going so that you have enough to live.
And where do we get our fuel? We get it from food or from the food we have already stored on our body also known as fat.
God designed us to carry some fat on our bodies to have an energy reserve and a back-up plan in case food was scarce.
Historically this was a matter of life and death. Our ancestors had to face feast and famine cycles - or feast and fasting cycles.
God designed our bodies to be able to handle these fluctuations by being metabolically flexible - able to burn both glucose and fat for energy.
This is the major concept I teach in Feast 2 Fast®— priming your body to burn both sources of fuel efficiently. This is our ideal metabolic condition.
(4:09) Our bodies have a built-in system always monitoring the situation of our energy availability:
You’ve probably heard that not eating enough food will cause the metabolism to slow down and this is why. When the body perceives less energy available it will slow down the rate it uses energy so that it can prolong what it has.
That’s why slashing calories to lose weight doesn’t work in the long term.
Remember that calories are just a measure of food energy and so when there isn’t enough energy coming in your body is like ‘whoa, slow down, stop the presses, there must be a famine going on in the world, we’d better hold onto energy’
It can also be the case that your body is having trouble accessing its energy reserves - your fat - to burn as energy. In that case it’s a similar problem, the body perceives this as an energy crisis too and will want to drive you to find more energy - which is food.
(5:44) So what is governing this situation here?
What tells the body to slow down or speed up energy usage? Hormones.
Energy and fat regulation are dictated by hormones. And your body uses your body weight set point as the compass to know which direction to go with it’s instructions. It wants to defend and keep you at your set point, this point of reference, so it knows how to keep energy regulation balanced. It’s all with the intention of protecting you - remember, your body is always on your side.
Picture it kind of like a thermostat - if you’re comfortable at 72 degrees, the thermostat will kick on the heat or the air to maintain that temperature.
If your body is comfortable with its set point at 200 lbs, it will kick in hormones to maintain that weight and adjust as needed.
Now, I can hear your thoughts talking to me through the sound waves and you’re like - but I’m not comfortable at that weight, I don’t want that to be my set point, I don’t want my body trying to keep me there, I want to lower the temp dadgummit!
When your set point has creeped up over the years, you don’t want the thermostat defending that weight. You don’t want that weight to represent your new norm and point of reference for how your body determines its thermostat setting.
(8:18) So what do we do?
First we have to regulate two major hormones that are key to monitoring our energy availability and usage and those are insulin and leptin.
Part of the reason the body weight set point creeps up over the years is because these two hormones have gone completely wonky. Your thermostat has lost control to reasonably signal appropriate times to blow cold or hot air.
This can happen for a lot of reasons but some big ones are: eating too many carbohydrates and processed food, not getting enough sleep, being overly stressed, and yo-yo dieting.
Insulin:
Primarily known as the storage hormone.
It helps your body store energy which is so important. The problem comes when we have too much insulin circulating in the body, because what does that tell our body to do? Store, store, store. And we don’t always want to be in storage mode, sometimes we want to be in burning mode, right?
But we can’t be in burn mode and storage mode at the same time. Insulin blocks burning mode.
The primary thing that overproduces insulin in our bodies and keeps us in that storage mode is eating too many carbohydrates and eating too often throughout the day. That sets off insulin all the time. Your body has to put that energy away.
Insulin is what escorts glucose - which is sugar, remember that all carbs turn to sugar in the blood - into your liver and muscles for storage. When the liver and muscles storage capacity is full, insulin escorts glucose to be stored in your fat cells as fat. So excess carbs end up becoming fat.
Not only that, but when we’re eating too many carbs and constantly setting off insulin, your body gets sick of it showing up all the time. Your body is finally like back off jack, I’ve got other things to do besides always dealing with you and so your cells become insulin resistant - they resist letting insulin bring energy into the cells.
The problem is, then your cells don’t get the energy and your body is like - we have an energy crisis, there is no energy available. And it can’t burn fat for energy either because you have so much insulin circulating in your system.
Insulin blocks fat burning. That’s a recipe for diabetes and obesity.
(12:44) Leptin & Grehlin:
Leptin is the hormone that signals our brains that we are full, we don’t need any more energy coming in. It’s what I call the ‘put-down-the fork sister hormone’.
On the flip side of that we have a hormone called ghrelin, which is what tells us to ‘pick up the fork sister’. It’s the one that tells us we’re hungry, that it’s time to put in more energy and eat.
Leptin is produced by our fat cells and signals our brain that we’re full, we have enough energy, stop eating, no mas por favor.
This makes sense because leptin is like the onsite manager, the man on the ground in the fat cells with it’s finger on the pulse of what’s happening. Like, yep, we’re good here. I’m sending a message up to the big wigs in the brain to stop sending energy.
Just like the body can get tired of seeing insulin all the time, it can also get tired of seeing leptin all the time and will become leptin resistant. So the brain is not getting that message that there’s plenty of fat, we’re full, stop eating.
A person who is at a more ideal weight is going to register this leptin signaling more efficiently. But the overweight person is not. I know, seems so not right.
It’s when this insulin and leptin signaling get messed up that our set point increases and the body is doing what it can to try and normalize the battle between the hot and cold air.
Think about it, insulin is trying to get your body to store and leptin is trying to get your body to stop storing. This is all very disruptive to your body’s ability to maintain good energy regulation.
(15:57) Cortisol:
Cortisol is the stress hormone.
The more that you have floating around the more it always throws off the setting on your thermostat.
Excess cortisol can make you insulin resistant which could also lead to leptin resistance. Ay, yi, yi, what’s a girl to do?
(17:29) Let’s talk strategy and solutions my friends…
#1. Reduce Carb Load:
The unopposed carb train is going to work against your weight and your health for your whole life.
That doesn’t mean that carbs are bad or that you can’t eat them or that you have to go super low carb like in a keto diet, it means, they need to be more proportionate to protein and healthy fats.
In Feast 2 Fast® we’re trying to keep our carbs below 75ishg on most days. This will help reduce insulin and help work on making the cells more insulin sensitive instead of resistant so that the body can actually burn fat and register that energy is available.
#2. Sleep:
Y’all, I’m going to remind you of this all the time.
Sleep is as important as food.
You can eat well but if you’re not getting enough sleep it’s a major stressor on the body which comes with cortisol which can lead to insulin resistance and the whole cascade of problems.
You can’t detoxify properly which is an added stressor on the body. Lower your carbs, get some sleep, eat real food that your body can recognize and use, plus get sufficient water.
#3. Fasting:
Fasting is an amazing way to reset your thermostat and get the hot and cold air blowing at the appropriate times.
It’s a fast track way to lowering insulin and helping the body get back to recognizing true hunger and satiety signals. Satiety being a fancy word for full.
Fasting it’s not as alarming or as much of a stressor to the body as trying to undereat by dramatically cutting calories. Again, the body will respond to that by slowing metabolism to conserve energy. Fasting doesn’t do that because you’re still getting plenty to eat, you’ve just allowed your body the opportunity to burn some of it’s stored energy.
In Feast 2 Fast® we practice intermittent fasting — anywhere from 12-16 hours a night. And we also incorporate SuperFasts which are longer fasts and we don’t set a specific amount of time for that, I just ask my Feast 2 Fasters to push those boundaries a little bit and lean more into the Lord during that time.
Fasting is an overall excellent spiritual, mental and physical tool and if you aren’t doing it yet, why not?
#4. Feasting:
Feasting or having a few days a week where you can eat more carbs and fun foods that aren’t necessarily great for you but that you don’t want to give up for forever.
Feast days would also be perfectly timed with holidays, birthdays, vacations, times when we celebrate. Feasting is part of the natural and normal rhythm of eating.
Historically people celebrated feasts all the time. But also historically those feasts were balanced out by fasts, but in modern times we ignore that part.
We feast and feast but don’t dial it back enough to balance things out. We need to get back to that rhythm which is why I created Feast 2 Fast® - sometimes we feast and sometimes we fast and our bodies are not only designed to handle that but it can also be really good for the metabolism.
That change-up of fasting and feasting keeps our body and metabolism on its toes by asking our body to use energy and hormones in a different way and get efficient at it.
You’ve probably heard that it’s good to change up your exercise so that it keeps your body challenged and the workouts effective. It’s kind of that same principle. A little change-up in eating routine )like the feasting and fasting) can keep your metabolism efficient and effective.
#5. Short Burst of Intense Exercise:
Exercises like sprints or a HIIT workout are great for torching fat and moving the needle on a metabolic plateau.
I’ve talked about how much I love doing sprints. That changeup between walking and busting out in a fast run and alternating those moves is so good for the body and, again, asks the body to be on it’s toes and ready to utilize energy in a different way.
These occasional “change-ups” of interjecting more intense movement keep the body challenged and prevent it from settling into a routine that becomes ineffective. The body adapts to repetitive action - including aerobic exercise. Over time, you get less results from the same exercise.
And from a historical perspective, This would be more in line with how our ancestors moved. They did a lot of walking, a lot of low grade, non stressful movement but then sometimes needed some more hustle and muscle.
Occasionally, they would have had to run fast and lift heavy things for specific tasks. Again, it’s the rhythm of the change-up whether it’s feasting and fasting with our food, or alternating simple movement with more intense bouts of speed or strength.
(29:29) Closing Thoughts:
Ok y’all I hope today’s podcast gives you some insight, some inspiration and some hope that there are tools, there are ways we can bust through the chains that seem to be holding us back.
You can join us for the next round of Feast 2 Fast® which is my 4-week metabolic makeover and we put all of these things together, streamline it and apply it. And we put God first the whole way!
(31:31) Outro & Disclaimer
Thanks for listening! Have a healthy and blessed week!