Suppose you had a “fatmeter” that would send out a loud “STOP!” message to your brain once you have accumulated enough fat. Suddenly, you wouldn’t feel like pizza, ice cream, or fries. You would look at these favorite foods, even smell their enticing odors, and not even be tempted. Or maybe you decide to eat anyway, and your metabolism would simply speed up to burn off the extra calories.
Nice fantasy, huh? Well, it’s not that far fetched. Believe it or not, you have that mechanism built in. So why do you wonder if you always feel driven to eat, even if you consider yourself overweight or having a hard time keeping it off? And why do you gain weight when you don’t control yourself?
Well, maybe your meter is broken. Or maybe your alarm isn’t loud enough to trigger a reaction in your brain. And that is very bad. Because this mechanism is so powerful that the people it works for never have to fight the urge to eat when they’re not hungry. Staying at a healthy weight comes naturally to them; it’s not something they have to work through with deprivation diets and long hours in the gym.
Unfortunately, for many of us, this powerful weight regulation system has gone awry. Food still tempts us long after our caloric need is satisfied. And the extra calories result in piling on extra pounds. Our body no longer knows how to regulate its “set point”, the level that is biologically ideal for us.
But do not worry. I offer information to help you learn how to reset this powerful mechanism so your body can naturally reach its healthiest weight. You will be able to eat normally without thinking about calories, allowing your hunger/satiety/appetite levels to regulate what and when you eat in a remarkably efficient mechanism. Eating will be simple and pleasant.
Benchmark: Your Ideal Weight
When working properly, this weight regulation mechanism is as precise as the most sophisticated scientific instrument. You do not believe me? Think of a fifty year old woman who weighs five pounds more than she did when she was twenty. If she eats about 2,000 calories a day, over the course of thirty years she eats about 22 million calories. Given that five pounds of body fat stores around 17,500 calories, that means her body was only 0.08 percent less in energy balance compared to 10%. power output. This equates to a difference of about 50 calories per month, less than the calories in an egg!
In other words, his energy balance was regulated with greater than 99.9 percent accuracy! How many things in life can you say that about? Certainly, there is no way you can be that precise in trying to exert your own willpower over what you eat and how much you exercise.
Until recent decades, weight stability in adults over long periods of time was the norm and an effortless process. A research study from the 1970s showed that the average weight of a man in his sixties was only four to five pounds more than the average weight of a man in his thirties. That kind of weight maintenance is not an accident.
So why fight? Stop counting calories and try to control your eating through diet. Instead, let your body regulate for you. I promise you will get much better results.
The healthy weight your body aims for is called your reference weight. Think of it like the preferred temperature on a fat thermostat. Like any thermostat, this one can be set to whatever point is most comfortable. The system then works tirelessly to do everything it can to align your body with that point. It acts like a biological force: the further you get from the center, the stronger the pull to get you back into the comfortable range.
However, this system only works if we let it. If you keep “moving” with the thermostat through the diets, the mechanism breaks down. This jolt is like a power struggle to wrest control of your body’s innate weight regulation mechanism and, in the end, only makes your body fight harder to maintain control. The result: Your body forces you to not only gain back the weight you’ve lost, but you may even pay a penalty with additional weight gain, and a now-higher set point to guard against future diets.
Instead of continuing to engage in this weight battle with your body, you could call a truce and join forces with your body to help achieve a healthy, natural weight. You will find that you will lose interest in eating when you are full. And your own body will compensate for those occasional excesses at parties without you having to deliberately deny yourself.