Can You Help Me Further Solve the “Mystery” of Weight Gain?

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Healthy Weight Loss— Without Dieting

Q&A 8:

Can You Help Me Further Solve the “Mystery” of Weight Gain?

If you are someone who has struggled with weight management, you are very likely to have scratched your head at some point in your life when you gained weight without any apparent rhyme or reason. From a research perspective, the ease with which many people gain weight can be explained by two basic factors: (1) the fact that we’re human and (2) energy balance.

Let’s take the human part first. In the world of weight loss research, you’ll find a long list of scientific terms that have been invented to describe our humanness in managing our weight. Researchers talk about “flexible cognitive restraint,” “reduced food disinhibition,” and “decreased food cue susceptibility” when analyzing weight loss patterns. But what do these terms really mean? “Flexible cognitive restraint” means that we sometimes stick with our weight loss plan, but other times we do not. When our thinking tells us to avoid a certain food, sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t.

According to researchers, we need to be flexible in these situations. “Reduced food disinhibition” means that when we violate our own weight loss rules, we still don’t want to go crazy and eat everything in sight. “Decreased food cue susceptibility” means that the mere sight and smell of a food must not always lure us into eating it. All of these terms are ways of describing our human nature—as human beings, we not only take pleasure in our lives (including the pleasure that comes from food) but we also make mistakes and feel overwhelmed in some situations. The research on weight gain says that weight gain is a natural part of our human experience. Sometimes we gain weight easily simply because we are human!

A second factor in easy weight gain is energy balance—or more precisely, the delicate nature of energy balance for many individuals.

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Healthy Weight Loss Q&As

Every moment of every day, our bodies need energy to keep going. Energy is needed not only to move our muscles, but also to keep us breathing, keep our heart beating, maintain our body temperature, and to allow for many other bodily functions. Each day, we need to consume sufficient energy in the form of food to fuel these bodily functions. For many individuals, however, this energy amount is relatively small and may often fall into the range of 1,500-1,800 calories per day. If an individual requiring 1,500 calories’ worth of food consumes 1,500 calories’ worth of food, all is well and energy balance is maintained. But if 1,600 calories’ worth of food are consumed, energy balance is lost. In this hypothetical example involving the consumption of 100 extra calories per day, not much weight would be gained in a single day, or even over the course of a week. But over the course of an entire year, this daily difference of 100 calories would add up to a 10-pound weight gain. That’s a very delicate balance! Especially in the case of processed foods or fried foods, few of us could accurately determine the difference between a 600-calorie meal and a 700-calorie meal.

Physical exercise is also involved in our energy needs, but in slightly different way than you might expect. While it is true that physical exercise directly burns calories and increases our energy needs in this way, it burns surprisingly few calories in the lives of many individuals. Leisurely-paced walking, for example, tends to burn no more than 5 calories per minute for many adults. While that amount is important, it only translates into 100 calories of energy burning per 20 minutes of leisurely walking, or approximately the same amount of calories found in one tablespoon of dry-roasted nuts. In other words, 20 minutes of leisurely walking doesn’t buy us very much room for additional food intake (while still maintaining energy balance).

According to energy balance research, what is more important about physical exercise is its role in building and maintaining our muscle mass. Since muscle tissue is a relatively active type of tissue in our

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Healthy Weight Loss— Without Dieting

body, building our muscle mass tends to increase our energy needs.

When added together, these two weight gain factors—being human and maintaining a delicate energy balance—help explain why weight gain comes so easily to many individuals. Even with some physical activity, many individuals have very little room to work within their allotted calorie intake. This delicate balance is easily upset because all of us are human, get overwhelmed at times, and make very human mistakes.

From a research perspective, the difficulty of weight loss for many individuals is explained by the same two factors that account for ease of weight gain: (1) the fact that we’re human and (2) energy balance. Let’s go back to the example already discussed of a person whose energy balance allows consumption of only 1,500 calories per day. If that person wants to lose weight, he or she will need to burn up more than 1,500 calories on a daily basis or consume 100 fewer calories each day. (Here we have the weight gain situation in reverse. Instead of gaining 10 pounds per year while consuming 100 extra calories each day, a person is losing 10 pounds per year while consuming 100 fewer calories each day or burning up 100 more calories.)

By burning up 100 extra calories each day, this person could expect to see about 10 pounds of weight loss per year. Ten pounds per year is less than one pound per month. Now imagine following a weight loss diet for 30 days and then stepping on the scale only to find a weight loss of only one pound! And think how particularly troublesome this result would be if you did not like the weight loss diet you were following, or if you felt like your weight loss diet was preventing you from living your everyday life. This is yet another reason why it’s important not to think short-term, as we do when we are on a diet. But to undertake a way of eating for our lifetime that is healthful and enjoyable and that can lead to long-term and lasting weight loss.

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