Understanding Being Adaptive

In my first post, I mentioned body compositions and adaptation.  To truly take control over your eating habits and establish healthy routines, you have to understand how your body works.  Adaptation can be a real pitfall problem when monitoring your weight loss because it’s the biggest cause of weight loss plateau.  To explain this, let’s look at a simpler concept: gaining weight.  You may have noticed that at some point, you gained weight and at another point, your weight gain hit a relative plateau.  In a sense, this is a form of adaptation.  Your body, having been signaled by extra food consumption that lean times are over, begins packing on the pounds to prepare for lean times ahead.  However, eventually your body’s weight starts to override your extra calorie consumption.  Technically, you get so heavy that your body has to work harder to move you around and therefore, if you’re me, you hit about 230 and find, apparently, that was about enough weight to balance out the extra calories.  Your body is but a slave to our species’ evolution.

Genetically speaking, your body remains relatively unaware of modern times.  Indeed, it still generally functions according to your genetic heritage, relative to when your people established themselves by locale and their bodies slowly adapted to that type of living.  Obviously, this is all dependent upon which genes express which traits.  That said, by and large we still have some rudimentary evolutionary roles our bodies attempt to maintain.  For instance, recent research suggests that not only are we evolutionarily designed to run but also that some of us are still really good at it… really, really good at it.  It isn’t really so surprising to find that in the relatively short amount of time it has taken for our civilizations to blossom, we haven’t quite shrugged off our old adaptive traits.

So how does this caloric/weight/energy adaptation affect you when you’re trying to lose weight?  By depriving yourself of calories, similar to the calorie storage signal sent when you eat too much, you signal the opposing effect.  Initially, therefore, you use up a lot of your fat stores, particularly when the drop is abrupt.  That is, initially your body acts as though this is a temporary setback to homeostasis.  However, as it becomes apparent that you’ll be maintaining this sparse lifestyle, your body, again attempting to maintain homeostasis, adapts.  Eventually you even start to lose muscle mass, which is heavier than your fat stores, so that you body doesn’t have to work so hard to maintain you.

Exercise routines work the same way.  You run every day for an hour and eventually your body will adjust to running every day for an hour, and you’ll find your steady weight loss slowing and slowing until you’re very confused and frustrated because your waistline stopped shrinking.  Granted, you do end up conditioning yourself for a daily run very, very well, but you’re not challenging your body enough to promote weight loss.  A fantastic weight loss exercise routine might involve variation in how you do the exercise.  For instance, you might alternate between running briskly for a shorter time, running slower for a longer time, walking quickly downhill, and jogging lightly uphill, by day.

So what are we to make of this 1000 calorie diet (or any other diet)?  Don’t let your body adapt to it, as though you’re starving, by making abrupt changes triggering starvation response.  Gradually reduce your calorie intake until you hit the mark.  Ideally, you wouldn’t want to maintain a very low calorie level for more than a week or two because, again, you'll adapt, this time to your body's attempt to balance your diet with your output… but hey, we’re in the business of mind over matter on this blog!  Therefore, to help my body manage this change, I’ve added nutritional supplements to my diet (my multivitamin) to ensure that though my calorie intake is low, my nutritional value is high, making my body feel well managed even though the relative energy is unavailable.  Similarly, to discourage muscle loss, I’ve made sure that I maintain protein levels as though I were still on a 2200 calorie diet; as long as my body has what it needs to make my muscles run, it won't think it needs to unburden me by ridding me of my muscles.  Hopefully, I can trick evolution a bit.