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Originally Posted by diemde
Thank you for sharing this, ItsTheWooo! I appreciate it and am really trying to "get it".
Do you know if there any way of determining an individual's set point? How did you come to the conclusion that you were at a set point?
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Hello
When you are approaching your set point, you will know it. You will start to feel more like an anorexic than someone on the low carbohydrate diet
. You will manifest hypothyroid symptoms: Weight loss will slow considerably, almost comming to a halt. You may even gain weight. Your hair might fall out, your nails will become weak and brittle. You will feel very cold. You will feel tired and have zero energy. Leptin has master control over the thyroid, so when leptin levels
plummet you will become hypothyroid which is responsible for these symptoms. This is why starving people feel cold and tired all the time. In addition to feeling and looking half-dead, you will have an uncontrollable appetite. You will feel hungry even after eating. You will frequently want to binge eat and have very little control over it. This is why anorexics, recently recovering or not, often binge uncontrollably... they are rebounding from rather severe starvation and they are powerless before natures instincts telling them to eat. Once they start eating, they just can't stop.
So, if you are basically feeling like a happy, healthy, full of energy individual enjoy the low carbohydrate lifestyle ... don't sweat "starvation mode". Odds are you are faaar from it.
In general, most people have set points in the normal weight range, but people with a history of yo-yo dieting or other metabolic disturbances (say, a genetic predispostion towards overweight caused by being born to a gestational diabetic, or inhereting genes which make you prone to IR) may have their set point in the overweight or even the obese weight range.
This is really an individual thing, but in general if you have a tendency to gain weight you probably won't be a skinny minny at your ideal weight. Look at the other women in your family who are mindful of their eating habits; odds are their weight range is what you
should be in. Personally in my family the girls become overweight easily, and at their ideal they are about a size 7-9. So this is why mo goal is 135, as I figure at 135 I'll be a size 9.
Another thing you should be aware of is that set point can
rise but unfortunately you really can't lower set point. It would be kind of like developing resistence to insulin; you can develop insulin resistence but once you have it you really can't reverse it, you can only control the disease. Your body raises the set point ever so slightly with each "famine". Every time you starve yourself (through very low or no calorie dieting), your body percieves that a famine has happened. To better protect itself next time, it reacts by causing you to gain more weight when reintroduced to food in "times of prosperity", through mechanisms not yet understood (but probably has something to do with decreasing sensitivity to leptin, the anti-starvation hormone).
Those individuals less sensitive to leptin require more leptin before your body senses starvation, and as I said the only way to make leptin is to gain
fat. So every time you yo-yo diet, you raise your set point unnaturally high, and your body requires more stored bodyfat to feel like it has "enough" fuel in reserve for the next famine. This is why it is VERY IMPORTANT not to truly starve yourself to lose weight, or do anything which
can't be maintained to diet with. Repeated yo-yo dieting is the *absolute worst* thing you can do to your body, and you *will* make yourself permenantly fatter through it. I don't mean to ruin anyones day who has a history of yo-yo dieting, it
is possible to lose weight when you have such a history, but please be aware that if you have a history of yo-yo dieting it will be much, much harder to lower body fat levels than if you had never dieted at all.
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What do you mean by "to be circulating"? Is leptin produced when a fat cell is filled or depleted...or does something else trigger it?
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The fat in a fat cell is metabolically active. It is a living, breathing, organ. It not only stores hormones, but it produces hormones as well (which is why overweight women and men tend to have sex hormone disorders and other hormonal issues; they have too much fat and therefore too much hormones). One of the many hormones your fat cells produce is leptin. Leptin is "percieved" to be in existence by receptor sites in the body; most leptin receptors are clustered in the organs that make up the endocrine system, mainly the thyroid and pituary axis, but also the tongue (leptin helps regulate appetite; when leptin is low you will crave carbohydrate).
When there is a positive energy balance, that is when you are gaining fat, leptin levels rise. When there is a negative energy balance, that is when you are losing weight, leptin levels begin to fall. So you see, level of body fat equals level of circulating leptin; how sensitive your leptin receptors are are to leptin (that is, how much fat your body THINKS you should have) dictates at what weight you will be when you start to encroach upon the dreaded set point induced starvation mode.
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Based on your theories, it would seem that folks who have a lot of fat could go quite low in caloric intake and still be successful. The key would be to know when we are taking in enough "material" for the body to be able to repair itself. How could that be determined? I believe the fat fast is kept at 1000 calories. Assuming that 4 of the 9 from fat are discarded, that really is quite low then.
Thanks for educating me! I truly do appreciate it.
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Hmmm well I am not totally sure if the metabolic advantage is really 4 of 9 calories spent, although I am sure the metabolic advantage does exist I just don't think it is quite that generous
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Yes, the obese have a long way to go to lose weight, but the bonus is that because they have so much extra unneeded body fat, they can create quite large caloric deficits before their body starts to fight back. This is especially true if they are comming from a "virgin dieter" history. I personally lost most of my weight in the first few months, and the whole time I did so without any negative side effects other than electrolyte imbalance caused by rapid fluid loss (a side effect of the rapid weight loss).
In my opinion, if you are NOT hungry, there is no need to eat more. Eating more will not speed up weight loss. While it is true that any restriction on food intake does temporarily lower metabolism, eating more will not help create an energy deficit because the extra energy you take in will always be more than the deficit created from using that energy for digestion or repairs.
So, don't sweat starvation mode or anything like that. In general, eat a nutritionally rich balanced diet that leaves you satisfied but not stuffed. If you are hungry, truly hungry, than eat more. Eating a higher % of your calories more from fat may help speed up rate of loss due to the metabolic advantage, but eating ADDITIONAL calories, regardless of where they come from, will probably
not increase your weight loss.