Losing weight is often considered a positive thing.
This helps improve health, make better looks and all the benefits both physically and mentally.
However, the brain does not necessarily recognize that.
Your brain is more worried about preventing you from starvation, ensuring that you (and your genes) exist.
When you strong weight loss , the body starts trying to conserve energy by reducing calories consumed .
It also makes you feel more hungry, more lazy and increases your appetite.
This can cause you to stop losing weight, and make you feel so miserable that you have to give up trying to lose weight and gain weight again.
This phenomenon is often called the "hunger regime," but is actually just the natural mechanism of the brain to protect you from being .
Fortunately, there are some things you can do to help prevent this from happening, then you can continue to lose weight without torturing yourself.
But before we do that, let me explain what is the hunger mode, and how it works.
What does "hunger mode" mean?
What people often call "hunger mode" (and sometimes "metabolic injury") is the body's natural response to long-term calorie restriction.
It is related to the body's response to reducing calories consumed by reducing calorie consumption to maintain energy balance and prevent hunger.
This is natural physiological response , and not really controversial. It is accepted by scientists, and its technical term is "adaptive heat generation" .
I will use the term hunger mode in this article, although it is really a wrong name because of hunger real almost completely unrelated to the majority of discussions about weight loss.
Hunger is a useful physiological response for a long time, but it is more harmful than beneficial in the modern food environment, when obesity is widespread.
Calories, calories
Obesity is a disorder of excess energy accumulation.
The body loads energy (calories) into adipose tissue and stores it for later use.
If more calories go into fat tissue than calories come out, we will get fat. If the amount of calories coming out of fat tissue is greater than the amount collected, we will reduce fat. It's true.
There are quite a number of diets that lose weight that reduce the amount of calories consumed. One of all Calorie control directly (calculate calories, weight, etc.), others reduce appetite for people automatic eat less calories.
When this happens, the calories leaving the fat tissue (calories out) become bigger than the calories that go in there (calories in). So that we lose weight.
However, the body does not recognize this like you. In many cases, it sees this as the beginning of hunger.
So body resist , doing everything can let you stop losing weight.
The body and brain can react by making you hungry (so you eat more, increase your caloric intake), but this discussion will focus on what happens to calories consumed ( calories out.
Hunger wants to say that your body will reduce calories from your body to restore energy balance and prevent you from losing any extra weight, even if you must continue to limit calories.
This phenomenon is very practical, but is this reaction strong enough to prevent you from losing weight or even starting weight gain whether or not it is still limiting calories is not clear.
Summary: What people call "hunger mode" is the body's natural response to long-term calorie restriction. It involves reducing the amount of calories consumed, which can slow down weight loss.
The amount of calories consumed may change
The amount of calories consumed in a day can be divided into .
- Basic metabolic rate (BMR): The amount of calories your body uses to maintain important functions, such as breathing, heart rate and brain function.
- Thermal effects of food (TEF): The amount of calories burned while digesting a meal. Usually about 10% of calories.
- Thermal effects of exercise (TEE): The amount of calories burned in physical activity, such as exercise.
- Heat generation in non-exercise (NEAT): Fast movements burn calories, change positions, etc. This is usually subconscious.
All four types can slow down when you cut calories and lose weight.
It involves reduced metabolism (both consciousness and subconsciousness) and major changes in the function of the nervous system and various hormones .
The most important hormones are leptin , thyroid hormone and norepinephrine, all may slow down when limiting calories .
Summary: There are many ways for the body to burn calories. It can all slow down when you limit calories for a long time.
Research shows that limiting calories can reduce "calories".
Studies show that weight loss reduces calorie consumption .
According to a large evaluation study, this number is 5.8 calories per pound lost, or 12.8 calories / kg .
This means that if you lose 50 pounds, your body will burn 290.5 calories a day.
Reducing calorie consumption can be much larger than what is predicted due to weight changes.
For example, some studies show that reducing and maintaining 10% of body weight can reduce calories burned by 15-25% .
This is one of the reasons that weight loss tends to slow down over time and why it is difficult to maintain weight loss. You need to eat less calories to live !
Note that it is possible that this "slow" metabolism is even greater in some groups that have time to lose weight like postmenopausal women.
Muscle mass tends to decrease
Another side effect of weight loss is that muscle mass tends to decrease .
As you know, muscles work positively in terms of metabolism and burn calories continuously.
However, reducing the consumption of more calories can be explained by reducing muscle mass.
The body achieves higher performance when working, so it requires less energy than before when doing the same amount of work .
Therefore, limiting calories makes you consume less calories for physical activity (either intentionally or subconsciously) that you do.
Summary: Losing weight and reducing calorie consumption can lead to reduced calorie consumption. On average, this amount drops to about 5.8 calories / pound (12.8 calories / kg) of lost body weight.
How to avoid metabolic decline
Remember that your metabolism (metabolism) slows down is simply a natural reaction to reduced calorie consumption.
Although reducing calorie consumption is inevitable, there are some things you can do to mitigate the effects.
Lift the weight
The most effective thing you can do is endurance exercise.
The obvious choice would be to lift weights, but body weight exercises may have good results.
Studies have shown that endurance exercise, such as muscle strength training, can have great benefits when you're on a diet.
In one study, three groups of women were on a diet of 800 calories / day.
One group was instructed not to exercise, an aerobic exercise group (heart rate exercise), while the third group worked hard .
Both groups of women who did not exercise and aerobic exercise lost muscle mass and significantly reduced metabolic rate.
However, women who exercise endurance maintain metabolic rate and muscle mass and muscle strength level.
This has been confirmed in many studies. Weight loss reduces muscle and metabolic rate, and endurance exercise can (at least in part) prevent that from happening .
Keep high protein levels
The protein is the king of multi-nutritional nutrition when it comes to weight loss.
High protein consumption can reduce appetite (calorie intake) and increase metabolism (calories out) from 80 to 100 calories per day .
It can also reduce cravings, reduce snacking at night and make you eat fewer hundreds of calories a day .
Remember that this only includes work more protein into the diet without limiting anything.
However, the amount of protein consumed is also important to prevent adverse effects from long-term weight loss.
When you consume a lot of protein, your body is less likely to break down muscle to get energy.
This may help maintain muscle mass, so (at least partially) prevent metabolic decline associated with weight loss .
Resting from diet is also effective
Some people like to repeat the "eating back" regularly during a diet off for several days.
On those days, they can eat more than a little maintenance, then continue with a diet a few days later.
There is some evidence that this may temporarily increase some hormones associated with weight loss such as leptin and thyroid hormone .
Taking longer breaks like a few weeks can also help.
Just make sure you know what you're eating during your break. Eating is enough to survive or a little more, but not too much to start getting fat again.
Prepare to raise a few pounds from supplements and boost water. But this has nothing to worry about.
Summary: Lifting weights and maintaining high protein consumption are two science-based ways to reduce muscle loss and metabolic decline during weight loss. A break while on a diet can also be helpful.
Losing weight may be due to many reasons
When people start to lose weight, things can happen very quickly at first.
In the first few weeks and months, weight decreases rapidly without much effort.
However, things slowed down afterwards. In some cases, weight loss is much slower, can last for weeks without any noticeable changes on the scale table.
Stagnant weight loss can have many different causes (and solutions), and it doesn't mean you don't lose weight anymore.
For example, water storage is often a major cause of stopping weight loss.
This article lists 15 ways to simply stop losing weight.
Hunger is true
The hunger regime is real, but it is not as strong as some people think.
It may reduce weight slowly over time, but will not make someone gain weight even while limiting calories.
It is also not a "turn on and off" phenomenon like some people think. It is a distribution according to the nature of the body to accommodate the increase or decrease in calorie consumption.
The hunger regime is really a very inaccurate term. Something like "metabolic adaptation" or "metabolic impairment" would be much more appropriate.
This is simply the body's natural physiological response to reduce calorie consumption. Without it, humans would be extinct thousands of years ago.
Unfortunately, this protective response may be more detrimental than useful when overeating is a far greater threat than the hunger for human health.
