You Need to Eat more, Pt. 1

From a nutritional philosophy perspective, my mom and I have very little in common. I’m a committed endurance athlete and nutrition communications consultant who helps fitness-minded folks eat for performance or weight management. My mom is a meat n’ potatoes Midwesterner who constantly frets over how skinny her son is, although she’s glad that riding his little bicycle makes him happy. 

That said, we align when it comes to our number one piece of nutrition advice: “You need to eat more.”

Why we give this advice is completely different. MOVE Nutrition didn’t ask my mom to write a regular column on sports nutrition (to their discredit), so I’ll leave her rationale out of it. However, I’m happy to share mine. 

This advice usually pops up in a couple scenarios. The first involves cyclists relatively new to their sport who hit a performance plateau after a few months of amazing progress. Most of these folks simply aren’t aware of the prodigious amount of calories endurance athletes require to function. We’ll cover this one next time. 

Today, I’d like to talk about the customers I dealt with during my tenure at the fitness company Beachbody (now BODi). Oftentimes, people would use our programs, have great results, then hit a weight loss plateau with “just five pounds left to lose.” 

My initial comment would invariably be, “You don’t need to lose that last five pounds. Your fitness is awesome and you look great. Now, please stop posting your underwear selfies on my social media.”

This advice usually fell on deaf ears except, thankfully, the underwear selfie part.

When trying to lose those final few pounds, it’s all about outmaneuvering adaptation. Adipose tissue (body fat) functions as emergency fuel, so your body works to hold onto it, especially if you’ve been stressing it by combining a calorie deficit and consistent hard workouts. It has no idea how long this deprivation will continue, so it does what it has to do to survive.

Our systems are complex; it’s not as easy as calories in/calories out. Dr. Herman Pontzer illustrates this in his book Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy, which is a must-read for any physiology nerd. 

As an anthropologist, Pontzer spent time in Tanzania studying energy metabolism in Hadza hunter/gatherers. Despite the fact that Hadza women walk 7km a day and Hadza men walk 14km a day—the same ground that the average American covers in a week—they burn the same amount of energy daily, as do folks in Europe, Russia, and Japan. This was after controlling for body size, of course.

Basically, your body adapts to both exercise and caloric deficits. Of course, there are limits to this. Pontzer claims the exercise adaptation works for about 600 calories of expenditure, which is why endurance athletes expending 1,200 plus calories in a workout override it. Also, it’s possible to drop your calories so low that you’ll lose weight no matter what. Of course, you’ll also auto-cannibalize your own muscle and possibly develop an eating disorder. There’s also the whole dying thing, so I don’t recommend it. 

On a brighter note, one possible solution might be to keep your metabolism guessing and switch up your workout route. This advice falls in line with Pontzer’s findings. In my experience, this works sometimes. However, I prefer breaking plateaus by asking people to up their daily intake by 300 to 400 balanced calories. I’ve seen this strategy work hundreds of times.

Pontzer’s theories don’t really cover chronic calorie deprivation, so let’s look instead to my favorite research studies of all time, “Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athlete,” which appeared in 2014 in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.

The paper explains several ways that the human body adapts to calorie restriction. For example, in well-fed circumstances, the process your cells use to generate energy can be sloppy, resulting in something called “proton leak,” which basically wastes a bunch of calories.

In times of famine, the process becomes more efficient so there’s less leaking. This might sound like bad evolution, but it actually allows your body to be more flexible in managing energy intake right down to a cellular level. Think of proton leak like a pressure relief valve in plumbing.

Other tricks include shifts in your hormones and reduction of your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. In other words, when you’re chronically low on calories, you tend to fidget less.

When you eat more, your body returns to its fidgety, proton-leaking old self—and those last five pounds become easier to lose.

But there’s a caveat. Lowballing calories tends to put the body in a chronically glycogen-deprived state. Glycogen is a backup supply of carbs in your muscles and liver. Glycogen is stored with water. When someone increases calories, they usually replenish glycogen—along with the water that comes with it—and they might gain a few pounds. 

Typically, they experience a boost in exercise performance along with the weight gain—because they’ve given their muscles some much-needed fuel. 

To be clear, it is physiologically impossible to gain three or four pounds of fat in a couple days from a 300-400 calorie increase. This is all water weight and it’s a very healthy thing!

I’m not a huge fan of offering diet advice focused on aesthetics, but I’ll never fault someone wanting to turn heads on their wedding day. What’s more, plenty of sports, ranging from wrestling to cycling, have a weight loss component to them.

In any of these situations, it’s great to have at least one weight loss strategy that’s not just about deprivation. 

Next week, we talk bicycles!