Why Your Body Fights Fat Loss (The Truth About Setpoint Theory) | Ep 491
Your metabolism isn't the problem. It's not making fat loss harder. On a normal diet, your metabolism slows far less than you've been told. Your body does "defend" itself, though setpoint theory may not be the reason why.
I'm breaking down the real reason your weight comes back and the 3 fixes that work. You'll also hear why the researcher behind the Biggest Loser study changed his mind, what happens to your hunger a full year after the diet ends, and what reverse dieting is doing to your recovery (it's not what you think).
Hit play if you want to lose the fat once and keep it off for good.
Download the free 14-Day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide mentioned in the episode: https://witsandweights.com/fatloss
Wits & Weights is the evidence-based podcast for strength training over 40, metabolism recovery, fat loss over 40, body recomposition, and healthy aging. Hosted by Philip Pape, creator of Eat More Lift Heavy and Fitness Lab.
Timestamps:
0:00 - The reality about setpoint theory
4:10 - Has the Biggest Loser data been misinterpreted?
7:18 - The "floor" your body defends hardest
8:54 - The real cause of real fat loss resistance
12:21 - Building a diet you can stick with
14:19 - 3 fixes to remove the fat loss friction
17:36 - The truth about reverse dieting and recovery
22:31 - Bonus: 2-question check before your next fat loss phase
Episode Resources:
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The reality about setpoint theory
Philip Pape 0:00
Picture this scenario. You've cut your calories, the scale starts to move for a few weeks, and then your body starts to push back. You're hungrier, maybe you're a little colder, maybe your workouts feel flatter, and your fat loss slows to a crawl, maybe it stops altogether. Now, the story you've often heard is that your metabolism is broken, or you've hit some fixed set point that your body will defend, maybe to the death. Today I'm going to show you what your body is actually doing when it fights fat loss, why most of that fight is not where you think it is, and why the popular fix that people reach for to protect their metabolism doesn't do what they think. Stick around because once you see where the real resistance is coming from, you can plan around it instead of feeling like your own body is betraying you. Welcome to Wit and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and the situation for this episode is all about set point theory and metabolism when it comes to your body fighting fat loss. So you've dieted before, maybe more than once, probably way more than once, and every time you get a few weeks or even a couple months in, it stops working the way it did at the start. And maybe somewhere along the way, you heard on a podcast or read in a book this idea that your body has a set point, a weight that it wants to be, and it defends that weight, kind of like a control system or like a thermostat defends the temperature you set it to. You go below that, and then the furnace kicks on, your metabolism drops, the hunger goes up, your body drags you back, kicking and screaming to where it started. It's like it has to end up there, is the way I like to put it. And there is some science behind that idea. That's why it's talked about, that's why it has spread so far in the industry. But I think the version that is talked about is oversimplified in a way that leads people to do the wrong things. This is one of my most largest frustrations in this industry is the perversion or cherry picking of science in a way that leads to people going the opposite direction than they need to. So today we're going to separate what your body is genuinely doing to defend itself, which is real and predictable, from the fitness industry, fit fluencer version on social media that is, you know, leading you to maybe buy the wrong programs, buy their stuff, do the supplements, go the wrong direction, try to lose fat in an unsustainable way. Then I want you to stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a two-question check you can run before you start your fat loss to tell you whether you're set up to keep the weight off or it's going to bounce back so you can get ahead of it. Takes 30 seconds and it's all about sustainability. So you're going to like that. So I'm going to set up today's episode for you. First, we're going to talk about why your body defends its weight and what that means. Is that actually happening? Then the part that I think gets misunderstood, which is where is the resistance come? Where do we end up with these plateaus? Why does our metabolism, our body, fight back? It's actually mainly not in your metabolism. And that's kind of the teaser. So stick around for that. And then what do you do about it? What is the practical steps that you have to take? And what are people talking about that's really popular that I definitely want you to avoid? So I know a lot of teasers in there. I'm sorry, it's just to I want to make sure you are listening closely because this is gonna help. I want to start with the popular advice. That's where there's always a grain of truth, but not necessarily the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So the story goes like this: your body has a set point. When you lose weight, your metabolism slows down to defend it. Sometimes it does so dramatically, you know, many, many calories. And then it stays slowed, maybe forever, which is why you regain the weight and then some. You'll hear people point to the biggest loser study as proof of this.
Has the Biggest Loser data been misinterpreted?
Philip Pape 4:10
Researchers followed contestants for six years. Their resting metabolism was still hundreds of calories a day below where you would predict, even after they regain most of the weight. So the takeaway is hey, dieting could wreck your metabolism permanently. Your body has a set point, and you can't win the game in the long term. Okay, well, we can't look at things in a vacuum, can we? We have to have some nuance. So when you lose a meaningful amount of weight, your body does expend less energy than a person who naturally weighs what you now weigh. So when you lose weight, your metabolism goes down. That is real. Researchers call it adaptive thermogenesis, and it's been measured in studies, you know, randomized controlled trials, human studies going back decades. There was even uh, if we go back to some of the seminal or classic work in this area that came out of Rockefeller University, they took people and changed their weight up or down by 10% under controlled lab conditions and measured what happened to their energy expenditure, their metabolism. When people dropped 10% of their weight, their bodies burned a good chunk fewer calories than their new smaller size would predict. And then when they were overfed to gain 10%, they burned even more than would be predicted. So the body seems to push back in both directions, and that's where this concept comes from. But then, you know, social media said, okay, we're gonna take the biggest loser, which is like the most extreme scenario you could pick, what we call class three obesity, a very brutal aggressive pace of weight loss, hours and hours of daily exercise, it's a television competition. And they said, okay, well, that's how the body's gonna work. We should learn from that. And the problem is that even Kevin Hall, the NIH researcher who ran the biggest loser study, who I have a lot of respect for because he follows the data even when it contradicts his earlier work. He later went back and said that this enormous slowdown the contestants saw in their metabolism was probably driven in large part by the sheer volume of exercise they were doing, not by the weight loss itself. So that's why you don't tend to see this in the average people doing it in an ordinary diet. So the set point, thermostat, body set point, settling point, picture, whatever, definitely has some things we can poke at. Okay. Your body doesn't necessarily do it the way it's described. If your body defended a fixed weight in such a rigid way, then the obesity epidemic wouldn't have happened. But instead, people drift upwards slowly over the years without much resistance at all. Like, why are we saying it works one direction but not the other? That wouldn't make sense. But if you try to drift downward, your body fights you really hard. Well, if settling point theory was correct, it would be somewhat symmetrical. So if it's not like, let's say, a fixed thermostat defending a fixed number, what is the reality? Well, the model that actually fits the
The "floor" your body defends hardest
Philip Pape 7:18
evidence is a bit asymmetrical. It's a bit lopsided. Your body defends the floor a lot harder than the ceiling. It treats weight loss as a threat, but fat gain is, yeah, that's fine. And researchers have a few names for this, but the practical version is that there is a range your body is comfortable in and it barely notices when you drift up and it pushes back when you drop below where you've been. So it's not a settling point. It's more of a settling floor. And the floor gets defended much more aggressively than the ceiling. And I think the insight here is when your body defends its weight, what you tend to think about is okay, my metabolism is tanking or my furnace is shutting off. And then it leads to fear about your metabolism being damaged, broken, whatever. But the metabolic slowdown in somebody on a normal diet is actually smaller and less permanent than you might think. You have one camp looking at extreme cases like biggest loser, and they're like, okay, the slowdown is big and it lasts a long time or maybe forever. And then the other camp with researchers like Katia Martins, who went and measured people after their weight had stabilized instead of while they were starving in the middle of the diet, and they found the metabolic adaptation was actually small. It was just a few dozen calories a day. Often it disappeared within about a year or two, and it didn't predict who regained the weight. So think about that. It did not predict who regained the weight. So if metabolic slowdown isn't really the main thing that's holding people back, then what is?
The real cause of real fat loss resistance
Philip Pape 8:54
Pretty simple. It's your appetite, it's hunger. That's where the real durable defense of why we can't lose weight can be found. And it's often ignored by set point theory discussions. In fact, it's ignored a lot, period. Fat loss is often so focused on the deficit, on energy balance, on calories, sometimes on protein, but not as much on appetite, hunger, sustainability, adherence, which is really where the success versus failure occurs. So there's a landmark study, Summithrin and colleagues, in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they put people through significant weight loss and then they track their hunger hormones. And then a full year later, so this is a year after the diet ended, their hunger hormones were still shifted toward eating more. So ghrelin, that's the hormone that drives hunger, was still high. The fullness hormones were still suppressed. And then when they asked the people how hungry they felt, they were still hungrier than before they lost the weight, even a year later. Now that is pretty wild. Like that is to me, stands out far more than this very subtle effect on metabolism. So a bot, your body, which has turned up your hunger signals and stay turned up, think about how much of an issue that is. It's also not surprising when you think about just the general population, why GOP1s have become so popular. The driver underneath a lot of this is leptin. That's the hormone that your fat cells use to tell your brain how much energy you have in storage. And when you lose fat, the leptin drops and your brain reads that drop as kind of a starvation alarm, right? I don't like the term starvation mode, but it's it's an alarm that says I need to eat more to make up for this loss of energy. So it cranks up hunger and it makes food more rewarding. Now we're getting to the crux of the matter. Now it nudges your expenditure down a little, but the food cravings, the rewarding, the reward, the noise, even the food noise is often from this. And we know that leptin is driving this because when researchers give weight-reduced people, so people who have lost weight, leptin back to top off what they lost, a lot of the adaptation gets reversed. So the low leptin is the driving signal, and the hunger is your body responding to that. So why this matters so much for you, listener, is if you believe that the thing holding you back is your metabolism, you're gonna chase fixes to your metabolism. You're gonna chase supplements, metabolism boosters, protocols that promise to repair or fix your metabolism. And you'll be solving the wrong thing. It's not actually the problem. The thing actually pulling you back toward that old weight that you did, and you keep cycling over and over and over is hunger and the drive to eat. And it operates for months and months and months after the diet is over, which means the fix is not repairing your metabolism. The fix is planning for the hunger with intention and building eating patterns that keep the hunger manageable. And that's a completely different game. You can win the game, you can take control of it, we do it all the time, but that is the game we are playing. And that's the thing I want you to plan around because if your body is going to fight the fat loss, then the approach
Building a diet you can stick with
Philip Pape 12:21
you take to undo that or prevent that or mitigate that obviously matters a ton. Now, just as an aside, that is what we built our program for eat more, lift heavy. I mean, it's right in the name in a way. The eat more is not about just eating unfettered. It's about eating more of the right things, eating enough to fuel yourself, not worrying about the metabolic piece of it, but really about the sustainability and the enjoyment and the satisfaction and the fullness and having just a great diet that's flexible and works for you. And we teach you these skills over 26 weeks. If you go to eatmoreliftheavy.com, you can learn about it. Scroll to the bottom, you'll actually see you can expand each of the three phases across 26 weeks and see what you learn every single week. But we don't just drop you into a deficit and say, hey, wish you luck. No, in that first phase, we want to get the intake, your food intake and your training dialed in before you ever push hard on fat loss. So when you do, you're losing it from a stable base with some an approach of building muscle and maybe even having more muscle and a slow enough rate of loss, which we talked about on the last episode, that your body doesn't fight back, along with how you eat, what you eat, all of that great stuff. And then we build the transition back to maintenance after fat loss in the right way. So you recover really quickly and you don't do the rebound and you don't do the binging and you don't have the food noise. So if you are just done with the crash and burn yo-yo dieting, the cycling more and more and more and re regaining, that's what this is for. Find out more at eatmoreliftheavy.com. That's eatmorliftheavy.com. So let's get practical now. You know where the resistance is coming from. It's coming from hunger and appetite and your body defending its floor, not a wreck damaged metabolism. So what do you do with that? Well, there's four things. Okay. And I'll say that the first three are the boring ones that actually work, all right?
3 fixes to remove the fat loss friction
Philip Pape 14:19
Number one is well, expect this to happen and use a slower deficit. We talked about this on the last episode. If you missed it, go check that one out as well. When you, when you know that your body is going to turn up hunger as you lose weight, well, the single single biggest thing you can do is not lose weight so fast that the hunger becomes unbearable and gets ahead of you. A slower rate of loss, something in a range of half to maybe 1% of your body weight a week. But for a lot of you, that's going to be sporty. So the half percent is maybe where we start. Tends to preserve more muscle, keeps the hunger signals from spiking, is hard. It all depends on your metabolism, your size, all that good stuff, right? That's why we have to personalize this. But there's plenty of controlled research on this in athletes, for example, showing that the slower you go, you tend to hold on to more lean mass. You might even be able to gain some lean mass. And of course, it's sustainable. That's number one, the deficit aggressiveness, how fast you go. Number two is of course, keep your protein high and keep lifting. I mean, how many times? I'm gonna repeat this on this episode, but if you're listening to this wits and weights for the first time, this is the biggest game changer of all. Protein is the most filling macronutrient, it directly fights hunger. Lifting weights is what tells your body to build and hold on to muscle while you lose fat. For the protein, we're looking at 0.7 to one gram per pound of body weight. And for the lifting, we're looking at lifting heavy enough with the right movements, with progressive overload, so that you actually get stronger over time and build that muscle. And this is especially true into your 40s and 50s for women into perimenopause and the menopause transition, where lean mass loss, bone loss, fat gain all tend to accelerate. Even when the scale doesn't necessarily move, your body composition is getting worse. And lifting in protein are how you fight that. And I know if you've listened to the show for a while, you're like, all right, move on, Philip. We need we got it. But it's so important to remember and get motivated to do this. Number three, and I'll say a lot of people don't do this. Number three is to plan the end of the diet before you start the diet. So a lot of people diet until they're tired of it, right? They're just sick of it. They're tired, it's not or whatever, and they stop and then they fall off a cliff and they go back to old habits. And now your hunger hormones are exacerbated, but you haven't really planned for all this and done it the right way. I'm sure you've done this, right? You, you, you white knuckle it to the goal. Maybe you don't even get to the goal, and there's no plan for what to do afterward. Instead, I want you to decide up front, hey, I'm gonna end this fat loss phase in a deliberate way at the right time, and I'm gonna recover up to maintenance calories on purpose. I'm not gonna reverse diet and take forever to get there. I'm going to plan in diet breaks or refeeds along the way where I spend two days or a week or several weeks at maintenance where I jack up those carbs. I have a recovery. It's in the middle, but it's allowing me to continue going on, right? And I'm holding on to my lean mass and I'm feeling good in the gym. I'm holding on to my sanity to help stick to the plan, but I plan the end of the diet before I start the diet. Okay. Now here's the fourth thing. And this is more of a warning. This is, I'll say, the popular thing that I want to talk you out of this, okay? And that's reverse dieting. And I just mentioned that briefly,
The truth about reverse dieting and recovery
Philip Pape 18:27
but I'm gonna lean into this. You've probably heard of reverse dieting. It's the idea that after a diet, you add calories back very slowly, 50 calories a week, 100 calories a week, whatever, over many weeks or months. And this supposedly protects your metabolism or restores it or keeps the fat from coming back. And it sounds very scientific, and you hear it everywhere. And so many people come to me like, well, I tried reverse dieting, or I'm in a reverse diet, or my coach had me reverse diet. Um, I hear it with physique competitors as well. And it sounds like a nice, careful, a careful conservative approach, and a lot of coaches and apps sell it that way. The problem is it doesn't do the thing it claims. And we had plenty of research on this. There is a controlled study that tested reverse dieting directly. They took people coming off a diet and they split them up into two groups. One group did the slow reverse diet, and one group just went straight back to their maintenance calories. Now, when I say maintenance calories, I don't mean their original maintenance calories, I mean their current maintenance calories, which may have declined from when you started the diet. One group just ate however they wanted, and the reverse dieting group did not protect their metabolism better, and they did not keep the weight off better. So actually, it was three groups. I apologize. So the just to clarify what I said before, you know, reverse diet, back to maintenance, and the other one just however they wanted. So, anyway, the least structured group actually regained the least, which actually makes sense when you understand the mechanism we talked about, because the thing suppressing your metabolism is the energy deficit and the low leptin. So the fastest way to reverse that is to eat more sooner and not crawl back up over the months, you know, three months or whatever, keeping yourself in a mild deficit the whole time. So trying to do that slow conservative crawl keeps you in a suppressed low energy state longer. And that's why potentially a group that just didn't care and just ate whatever, they just ate what their body was telling them they needed and they more than overshoots shot their metabolism to make sure they recovered. Now, whether that would lead to additional fat gain, that's a separate discussion. But when we work with clients and eat more lift heavy, that's that's part of the process, is like, let's know where our metabolism is at all times and let's jump right to it and recover as fast as we can without the extra fat gain. Now, I'm not saying reverse dieting is totally useless. I think for some people, adding calories back in a structured, gradual way from a practical perspective might keep them from going out of control, like binging as soon as the diet ends. So that's where structure is helpful. It's kind of like why, you know, intermittent fasting has no benefits other than if it practically helps you from a schedule perspective. So, same thing with reverse dieting, if it keeps you kind of grounded, sane, undoing your progress versus trying to jump right up and it kind of disrupts your eating plan overnight and it's hard to adapt to it, it might be superior for you, despite the fact that you are not recovering as fast. Do not use it though because you think it is protecting or repairing your metabolism or you're worried about gaining too much fat. Because that doesn't hold up. Use it more as a behavioral tool. It just like any of these other things that could be behavioral tools. Because at the end of the day, behavior and adherence, again, is where it's at. And we're actually gonna go deep on this in an upcoming episode on reverse dieting again. So keep an eye out for that. Hit follow to make sure you get that because it deserves a revisit and a full teardown on reverse dieting. All right, before we wrap up, I told you at the top that I'd give you a two-question check you can run before you start any fat loss phase to tell you whether you are ready to keep the weight off or you're gonna bounce back. That is coming up in a second. But if this got you thinking, hey, the answer is in an aggressive crash diet or keto or carnivore and cutting carbs or intermittent fasting, no, I need to get the foundation right first. I have a free guide for you. It's called a 14-day rapid start fat loss guide. It's not a crash diet, it actually walks you through building the two habits that make fat loss work before you get to the deficit, which is I'm just gonna reveal it, hitting the protein floor and getting consistent with strength training, which are, I think, is number two of what we talked about earlier. So this guide will help you like a jump start to that. Okay, I want you to go to witsandweights.com slash fat loss or use the link in the show notes, witsandweights.com slash fat loss. It's not calorie counting, cardio, none of that. It teaches you to read your trends properly, to track a few things for just a couple weeks so that you get started. Go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss. And if reverse dieting is something you've been curious about or you're even doing it, make sure to hit follow because we're gonna have that full breakdown coming up. So again, for the free 14-day Rapid Start Fat Loss Guide, go to wits and weights.com slash fat loss. All right, here is that check. It takes 30 seconds before you start your fat loss phase. I know you're impatient
Bonus: 2-question check before your next fat loss phase
Philip Pape 23:22
to get it going. Okay. Question one when my diet ends, what am I doing next? Sounds simple, right? But think about it. I really want you to think about it. I want you to think about the numbers, the eating pattern, what you're going to eat, how it's going to work, even when it might happen. That's a little bit more nebulous because it depends on how it goes. But if the answer is, you know what, I'll worry about it when I get there, you are not set up to succeed. Your hunger is going to be high, and just waiting to see what happens is going to set you back tremendously and it's just not going to be successful. So you have to plan ahead. Question two is the rate of loss I'm planning for in my fat loss phase. So how many, you know, pounds a week I'm expecting to lose or half a pound or whatever. Could I live at this level of hunger for as long as I think it's going to take to lose the weight I want? Okay. If the honest answer is no, then you're already setting yourself up for a problem. Now, you may have heard me talk about starting more aggressively first and then tapering down. You can definitely plan that in. And then you have to answer the question that way. Hey, could I do this for three weeks and then go down to this level and do that for another X number of weeks? Whatever it is. Okay. You basically want to build in the dot deficit so it's not too aggressive and you know it's not too aggressive right from the start, and be open to changing it as you go. So those two questions. Where am I gonna go with this when it ends? What am I doing? And could I live at this pace for the duration of the diet? And that's it. It's pretty simple, but a lot of people don't think about it and they they screw themselves during the process. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, your body is not betraying you when it fights fat loss, it's doing what it's built to do. And once you know how and why, you can plan around it instead of taking it personally. I'm Philip Pape, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
