Shout-out to Angela

Having a conversation with Angela, who commented on my last post.

First could you explain a bit more when you mean you didn't touch your metabolism? As in you never felt a change etc?

I mean that it functioned the same before, during, and afterward. I didn't cause it damage, I didn't slow it down or speed it up. People are so afraid of "ruining" their metabolisms and entering starvation mode. I don't believe it. I believe they're not experiencing the quick loss they want, so they make up other excuses for it like starvation mode or slow metabolism or I lost three pounds of fat but gained two pounds of muscle.

I also can understand what you are saying about not believing in the whole idea of starvation mode but I can't get behind it 100% as i do agree we are resilient but at the same time we are primal and really not that far removed in the scale of life from our primitive ancestors.

We may have to agree to disagree on this one, because to me it sounds like more excuses. It's been millenia and millenia. If we believe that our bodies are adaptable and have evolved since then, why would we claim they haven't adapted or evolved after all, just because our pattern of losing changes?

Losing weight is undoubtedly a complex process, much less predictable than a table in a spreadsheet, I won't lie. I never have the results I predict or hope for. But I know if I eat less, I lose, even if I can't predict how much. And it has nothing to do with ancient history. It has to do with whether we're getting adequate food. Are we? Almost certainly. There are extreme cases under which people are starved, but I don't think any of us [I guess I speak of people without eating disorders] are in those conditions.

But what makes me think you may be right about starvation is I had gastric bypass almost a year and a half ago. I was 366 and am now 190-184 depending on scale, time of week, etc. I went from losing thirty lbs a month, twenty, lbs etc to just 1-3 a month in the last three months.

Congratulations on your fantastic loss!

though I have severly fallen off the wagon as far as excercise! I am trying to find my mojo again and really is there mojo?

There certainly is inspiration, motivation, and dedication.

On Brad Pilon's blog I just watched a video entry that applies here. He talks about the skewed message we're getting these days—that we need to increase our exercise to match our consumption. That's pretty backward. We should reduce our consumption to the level we need, rather than trying to meet some activity quota that brings our consumption into balance. Why?

1. We can never out-exercise our consumption. We are capable of consuming hundreds or even thousands of calories in minutes. (When I was a teen I could eat a half a pizza, probably 2000 calories, in 10 minutes or so. How long does a burger and fries take? Or a heaping helping of cake and ice cream?) Exercising at maximum intensity, we burn maybe 6 calories per minute. You can see how out of whack that is, when it takes less than 60 seconds to eat a 280-calorie candy bar. It would take hours and hours of exercise to balance a single too-big meal.


2. There does exist, for every person, an amount of food that can be consumed daily that will reduce us to or maintain us at our optimal body fat level, without exercise. If eating food is the problem, then eating food should be the solution. We don't weigh more than we'd like because we exercise too little, we weigh more because we eat too much.


3. There does exist, for every person, a minimal amount of exercise that gives them the muscle appearance and mass they want. Doing more exercise beyond this minimal amount doesn't necessarily increase the amount of muscle mass, and may possibly just be a waste of time. And once that mass is established, those developed muscles won't be visible if they're still covered with fat from eating too much. (My own example of this: I have abs of steel. I can mantain my strong abdominals with just a few ab exercises every week; exercising hours and hours more doesn't make them any stronger, I'd need steroids to do anything more than I've done with them. But no one can see them, because they're buried under at least ten pounds of abdominal fat. No one would know, by looking at my body, what a strong belly I have.)

Anyway all those times my body was starved and I kept loosing I did have one plateau though and I had to increase my protein so maybe that was due to starvation mode??

I have no idea. I know when I'm eating reduced calories, a caloric number smaller than the amount I need to sustain my current weight, if I hit a plateau it breaks much faster when I eat more for a week than when I eat less for a week. I think we just need to change things up, give the body something new to process, freak it out a little. Because it isn't a simple equation, or a machine that gives us predictable results.