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Rapid Weight Loss
What is the healthiest way to approach a kind of rapid weight loss? And here what I think is happening is somebody has an event coming up or they're just tired of being the weight they are or carrying the amount of adipose tissue they are, and they want to know whether or not it is safe to, for instance, lose three pounds a week for a few weeks in anticipation of a wedding or some other event, and whether or not straight caloric restriction and increasing activity is the best way to approach that. With the understanding that they may gain back a little afterwards, and ideally they'd like to maintain it afterwards, but what do you think of that sort of approach? Cutting caloric intake in half, for instance, and then doubling your physical output.
Science Behind Rapid Weight Loss
It's interesting, because you might be surprised by what I'm going to say, which is that the research data actually tends to suggest that people who are obese and lose a lot more weight early are more likely to keep it off. That seems a little contradictory, right? That doesn't seem very sustainable, but you're weighing competing things. There's a sustainability aspect, but there's also buy-in, and buy-in is huge for sustainability. For a lot of overweight or obese people, if they start a diet and don't see something quickly, they bail on it because it's not working. Whereas if they see rapid results pretty quickly, they buy in even harder.
So I think the conversation, especially for any coaches or trainers out there, is presenting this as a trade-off. One of my favorite lines is, "There are no solutions, there's only trade-offs." I think Thomas Sowell said that. So you're having a trade-off here. Yes, you're going to lose fat faster. You might lose lean mass a little faster too, which can be a problem. But I will say the more adipose tissue you have, the more aggressively you can diet without negative consequences. Somebody like me doing a really aggressive diet is not going to be good for my lean mass, for two reasons: I have a higher lean mass than normal, and I have a lower body fat than normal. As your body fat goes down, the percentage of weight loss from lean mass goes up. People who are very obese have so much adipose tissue to pull from that there's very little reason for the body to catabolize lean tissue.
Balancing Rapid Weight Loss and Lean Mass
That being said, people often misinterpret results. They get an InBody or a DEXA scan, see that they've lost two pounds of lean mass, and overall they've lost twenty pounds. Keep in mind that adipose tissue itself is about 13 percent lean mass. There is a protein component to the structural part of adipose tissue, and it does have some water. So it's about 87 percent lipid, but the other part is lean. At minimum, you should expect a 13 percent reduction in lean mass when you diet. When you consider that you lose body water overall, which registers as lean mass, and that your splanchnic tissues can shrink a little, it's normal for the average person to lose about 25 or 30 percent of the weight they lose from lean mass. But that doesn't mean skeletal muscle tissue. Again, the more adipose tissue you have, the more aggressively you can approach the diet without really negative long-term consequences to lean mass or overall health.
But balance that with this: if I'm going to do this, I need to understand that I'm not going to be dieting this way forever. I'm doing this to give myself a boost at the beginning, and at some point I have to be okay with transitioning to something more sustainable.
Psychological Aspects of Dieting
Based on what you just said, it reminds me of the satiety signal effect of exercise. You mentioned earlier that exercising can improve our sense of when we've had enough to eat. I want to briefly mention that when Ali Rum was on the podcast, she mentioned a study they'd been doing, which I'd have to pair you with and hear the conversation as a fly on the wall. What she was telling me was that if people believe a food is nutritious for them, then eating less of it registers as more satiating. Whereas if people view dieting as a deprivation system, where dieting is hard and the food sucks, then they crave all sorts of other things. In their studies, people reported reduced craving when they were told that, for instance, a chicken breast with broccoli, some olive oil, and rice is actually quite nourishing and really good for you. People eat that and feel like they've eaten more. The satiety signaling goes up. That's a point Ali made; those aren't my data.
Human Behavior and Eating Habits
Satiety is so impressive. Even the rate at which you eat, right down to the size of the plate and the color of the plate, matters. The contrast in color makes a difference. I can't remember exactly, but I think if the plate is a similar color to the food, people eat more, whereas if there's a bigger contrast, they eat less. So even plate color can affect how much you eat. The human brain is very amazing but also very dumb in some ways. It's not an optimized algorithm. I always joke with people: just look at how humans behave. Put some water in front of them, like the ocean, and they'll pay ten times more for it, but we're just wired that way.
The reward signaling pathways in the brain run mainly on one chemical, dopamine. There are others, of course, but there are very few algorithms. It's sort of like intermittent reinforcement, random reinforcement, but in the end there aren't many algorithms, and we are probably not optimized, certainly not optimized for our own health, because people will eat themselves to death or drug themselves to death simply because something felt good at one point.
Long-term Benefits of Short-term Hardships
That proves your point. One of the things I tell people, which I said on Andy Frisella's podcast, is that the dichotomy of life is this: if you do what's easy in the short term, your life will be hard. If you do what's hard in the short term, your life will get easier. It's very strange. Ethan Suplee had a great example of this when he was over 500 pounds. He said, "The amount of work I had to do to construct a life where I could just live was so much more work than just going to the gym for a couple of hours a day." He said the gym work is hard, but when he looked back at how much work he had to do to sustain that lifestyle versus just going to the gym and restricting calories, maintaining the lifestyle of being 500 pounds was infinitely more difficult than what he does now. So again, a great example: short-term hard work, going to the gym and restricting calories, and long-term life is easier.