I am getting ready to head to Vegas for the weekend and I am in the betting mood to get ready. I'm willing to bet a significant amount that if you are reading this, you are trying to lose unwanted fat. I will even double up on that bet and say you probably have had difficulty losing fat at some point and have been frustrated. And one final bet is you probably have thought you may have a thyroid issue since you can't seem to lose weight anymore.
We usually will look for something to blame this on. The most common guess is Hypothyroidism. Our thyroid controls our metabolism. If it is not working properly than we will have a slower metabolic rate and most likely have weight issues. The problem is not really your thyroid though. The problem may be restricting your calories. Those that drop calories below your metabolic need for a prolonged time will spark a series of chain reactions in the body. The body responds to lower caloric intake by dropping T3 and T4 levels in the body, which are our thyroid hormones. It is believed the body does this when it is starving to attempt to preserve muscle tissue and prevent you from killing yourself by not eating.
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Simple, right? The cool part of this type of dieting is one day a week you get to increase your calories significantly and not feel like you are depriving yourself.
How did I do? Am I ready to make some bets in Vegas and win some $$? I am fairly confident with these predictions because I have seen it happen so many times. The most common method people use to lose weight is drop calories. Now this is probably completely necessary, but it is often done incorrectly. If you drop calories you will lose weight initially. Then you stall out, start eating more, and gain the weight back (and more probably). Why does this happen?
The good news is this is reversible. The key is we need to be more strategic besides just dropping your calories down to lose weight. The first step is to determine where you metabolic need is first. This is the number we want to use as a baseline in order to avoid our metabolism from slowing. There are a number of calculations and formulas you can use to determine this. Here is a simple one. Divide your weight by 2.2. Then multiply that number by 30. This is the approximate number of calories you would need to maintain your weight.
Let's use these numbers as an example. If you weigh 180lbs; we divide by 2.2 which is 81.81. This times 30 equals about 2455. That would be the number of calories you would consume to maintain your weight.
So what we need to do is drop our calories some to lose weight. If you figure out what your ideal weight is we can use that same formula to figure out what our caloric need would be at that weight. Let's say we want to weight 150lbs. Using the same formula we would need about 2045 calories. So this is our magic number now.
So if I eat around 2000 calories per day I should hit this goal eventually. Now we could just drop our calories but we run the risk of effecting our thyroid. So instead we alter our calories from day to day. If we look at the calorie needs for the week we would eat 14,000 calories if we averaged 2000 per day. Instead, what if I ate 1500 calories 4 days, 2000 calories on 2 days, and 3000 calories one day. We still hit that 14,000 goal but varied each day so our bodies never felt like they were starving and reduced our metabolism.
I hope this helps you with your weight loss battle. Wish me luck in Vegas. I'm sure I might have a few 3000+ days myself.
You Stay Healthy San Diego,
Mike Deibler
