What’s Wrong With Me?
You’ve tried dieting. You’ve tried every fad diet under the sun. You’ve thrown on a garbage bag, wrapped yourself in clingwrap, squeezed soaked waist trainers like a sponge saturated with your sweat… and still you don’t seem to make progress in the direction you’d like.
“What’s wrong with me?” You ask.
To which I reply: “Most likely? Nothing.”
The most likely, honest, fair answer is nothing is wrong with you. But what is wrong, is the lens with which you are viewing your problems, your plights. Perspective. Perspective can change everything.
How you approach going about finding a solution is largely dictated by perspective. Perspective of the landscape of the issue, the inputs, and the angles of attack. Allow me to lay out how I view the body with the hopes of helping you find an approach to making changes in your lifestyle. Where it doesn’t have to be a “make or break” decision between forcing yourself through a miserable diet for the rest of your life, or staying unhappy with your body.
*This discussion’s topic(s) will be dealing in generalizations. Claims and opinions should not be applied to individuals with specific medical conditions that have significant effects on metabolism such as thyroid conditions or genetically inherited conditions. These are outliers, and the aim of this conversation is to discuss the issue for the common man or woman.
Fat Weight & Metabolism
“You’re so lucky. You can eat whatever you want and not put on weight.”
That’s the kind of nonsense I grew up with as a naturally very skinny individual. An ad nauseam amount of perspectives not only making my struggles appear lesser to others, but also victimizing themselves; woe is me. Odds are that you’ve been on either side of this conundrum. Regardless of whether side of this particular fence you fall on, I am willing to bet you are approaching this concept unfairly, in any number of ways.
What’s one thing every single soul hears, regardless of the specific topic in health? Everybody is different because every body is different. Yet, how many of us actually apply this framework? How many actually grasp this concept? What makes each of our bodies different?
Each of our bodies specialize towards different specific processes that result in differing specific outcomes that result in our bodies and our personalities and the very ways we think about things differing from everybody else. What this also applies to, that you likely haven’t thought about is: weight gain.
But… weight gain in a different light.
What Is Weight Gain?
What does it mean to “gain weight”? Well, you can gain weight in a number of ways. You can gain weight by consuming more calories than you spend, leading to accumulation of the body’s storage form of calories; adipose tissue, otherwise known as fat. Or you can gain weight by consuming more calories than you spend while stimulating growth adaptations in the body, resulting in muscle tissue growth (and maybe a little fat accumulation, depending on quality & quantity of foods consumed). Or there’s weight gain in the form of water retention, which can happen when coming off a very dehydrated state (re-saturating the body). Water retention can also be stimulated through an increase in sodium consumption; incentivizing greater water storage by the body (we like to hold onto salt as it enables signal transduction, which is necessary to move, think, breathe… you know the good things).
Your Body Is Specialized
Weight gain is not an intrinsic negative. Just like being abnormally skinny is not an intrinsic positive.
If you gain weight easily, all this means is that your body is specialized towards energy storage. Individuals that pack on weight easily are individual’s who’s bodies are simply extremely skilled at very efficient energy capture & storage. This also means that individuals who are naturally skinny can be very inefficient at energy capture & storage. Think about it like financials. An individual who saves more successfully and accumulates more funds faster would be viewed as more successful than someone who spends as soon as they earn. So why are we not viewing our bodies and ourselves with a more similar lens?
So. Where does this bring us? First is Rule #1 when it comes to matters of biology; do not fight Mother Nature. Do not fight genetics. Work with Nature to get us to the finish line we want. Don’t swim against the current to cross the river, swim with the current. You might end up further downstream, but that can be accounted for once the turbulent waters are crossed.
How Do We Use Our Nature To Our Benefit?
If your body is extremely skilled at energy storage, what’s the most logical reaction? If you’re accumulating more capital than you can spend, what is the most logical move? Do you just increase your spending rate? Sure, you could. But that’s not a strategy for continued success into the future.
What would be a smarter strategy? Invest the excess capital into opportunities that yield cash flow, or dividends, or at the very least have a likelihood of experiencing an increase in value. What is the body’s equivalent of this strategy?
Stimulate the body to grow. Grow muscle.
Muscle vs Fat Economics
Growing muscle and engaging in physical activity is the bodily, individualistic version of investment. Let’s look at the differences between 1 pound of fat vs 1 pound of muscle.
Claude Bouchard’s work suggests that storing 1 pound of fat (~3,500 Calories) comes with a ~2 Calories/pound maintenance cost, while 1 pound of muscle (~700 Calories) has a maintenance cost of roughly 4-6 Calories/pound. While that may not sound impressive, that is a 2-3x Caloric burn rate per pound of weight in muscle vs fat. That’s a massive deal.
There are also competing claims that muscle will burn even 7-10 Calories/pound. As dynamics such as sex, height, prevalence of Type I vs Type II fibers, and individual organ’s demands all play a role in confounding findings. There are also discrepancies in these claims as it can be difficult to deduce the validity of metabolic consumption of a body. As this source claims that muscle consumes 50 Calories per day. And this one suggests 15-25 Calories per kilo per day.
There is still plenty of contradictions to be meted-out. In the aim of staying responsible, let’s stick to the lower assessment.
A single pound of muscle takes up approximately 20% less space than a pound of fat. We also have to consider the amount of nutrients and micronutrients that are required as inputs towards growing that muscle (which also comes with a significant energy requirement). These nutrients and the structures that result from the growth process also increase the density of the space occupied (what’s up density). While muscle can require ~100-200% more energy to maintain than its fat equivalent.
Losing Fat
We need to discuss Lyle McDonald. Lyle has done some quite impressive work in this corner of the field and produced, what I would argue, a very compelling elaboration of the “3,500 Calorie Rule” when it comes to weight gain and weight loss.
The mechanisms by which our bodies lose weight is a very complex and nuanced relationship between multiple balancing systems. One might argue that it’s almost like the body is a… complex… and… adaptive system…
Lyle McDonald has produced some work that debunks quite a few of the talking-points that continue to circulate through the health & fitness, bodybuilding, and strength & conditioning circles today. He provides compelling analysis for the 3,500 Calorie Rule (linked above) that even some of the most respected individuals in the physiology space have touted. This rule states that if you want to lose a pound of fat you must be in a caloric deficit that totals 3,500 calories in order to lose the equivalent volume of fat (1 pound). Makes conceptual sense. On the surface.
However Lyle goes through to concisely explain how that is not entirely true and explains the technicalities. Also, keep in mind how the body reacts to being in a caloric deficit — you cannot stay in such a state and expect to continue to lose at a commiserate rate perpetually, the body will update its metabolic demands to compensate for the diminished availability of energy.
This rule has also been used to try and argue that in order to grow a pound of muscle you therefore need to consume an excess of 3,500 Calories, based off the same logic. The problem is, however, that that is also not necessarily true. Rebecca Haight produced a good bit of literature that further corroborates Lyle McDonalds’s work over this very same topic. Growing that pound of muscle can require an excess of anywhere from 2000 to 3,500 Calories in surplus while the energy stored within only amounts to 700 Calories, and costs ~50 Calories per pound per pound per day to keep.
Why Does This All Matter?
Those who struggle to lose weight, are individuals that are extremely skilled at energy capture and storage. A very necessary process for facilitating muscle growth. Those who aim to change their condition will be served greatly in understanding this.
You don’t fight Nature. You work with it.
Engaging in activities that stimulate muscle growth, and staying consistent, will yield improvements in body composition. Those that aim to lose fat weight are behooved to grow muscle weight. All that needs to be changed is activity level and quality of diet. Those that aim to gain muscle weight, and do not necessarily struggle to stay thin, likely need to eat beyond their comfort levels while also maintaining activity and adherence to food quality and nutrient density. Just because you’re skinny does not mean you are healthy.
Conclusion
Each and every one of us and our bodies are specialized. In many more ways than one. Including the ease & speed at which we capture energy and store it. Two rules stand out as solutions for those that struggle to lose weight and those that struggle to gain: (1) growing muscle is the solution to your problems, and (2) engaging in regular resistance training & strength training will improve quality of life and body composition in 9.9 out of 10 cases.
The key to your success in making these improvements is learning how your own body is specialized. Are you like myself, where putting on weight has always been a difficulty? Or, are you an individual that more or less looks at a donut and gains a pound? Regardless of which end of the spectrum you fall under you will need: healthy nutrition, healthy sleep/wake routines, quality resistance training time, and quality cardiorespiratory training time.
The solution is simple. The execution is what is difficult.
You don’t starve into your frame — you grow into it.
I hope this helps you on your journey.
*I do find it quite interesting that so much is done to try and consider EE from the organs, fat, and muscle but little is done during these studies to try and account for the amount of energy consumed by thought and brain activity. Considering the brain accounts for 20-30% of energy requirement each day.
Not all minds are the same. Meaning each of our brains is operating at differing RPM’s; making the EE of each individual even MORE nuanced.
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