How food intake and appetite are controlled.
In a tightly regulated system in the brain, the decision to start eating, how much to eat, when to eat, and when to stop are all monitored. Our brain receives messages from our stomach, our body, our digestive tract, and our fat stores, and converts them into motion, to eat or to stop eating. So the brain helps to coordinate these sensing commands, we know where to get food when we’re hungry, what kinds of foods are available, and which foods are delicious and satisfying. The tiny part of the brain that controls the commands called the “hypothalamus”
A fundamental drive within the biology of all living beings is the need to find fuel to produce energy: we all need food to survive. So it’s not shocking that our bodies have such a complex mechanism, powered by hormones, to regulate food intake.
How and Why the Body Resist Weight Loss
What is weight set point?
Our appetite and weight regulation mechanism controls our food consumption by sensing the amount of fat in our body. The amount of fat and body weight that our body tries to reserve is called the weight set point.
If our weight falls below the set point, it compensates by slowing the metabolism and increasing the appetite. When we gain weight, the same thing occurs. We feel fuller and once we lose weight back to our set stage, our metabolism speeds up.
You may be wondering why these weight set point is not working for some people given that their weight increases steadily. Most study now shows that our bodies no longer function normally in obesity.
When a person with normal body weight is put on a very low-calorie diet with a normal body mass index, he or she is likely to lose weight. But our energy management system continues to push the weight back to our starting point once they are allowed to eat at will. When we’re deliberately overweight, the same happens. We subconsciously lose appetite when allowed to eat at will, and our brain speeds our metabolism until we lose weight.
Restricting Calories & Effects in Obesity
Several studies have shown that diet-induced weight loss is related to changes in hormones that together facilitate regaining the lost weight.
When you restrict calories you may lose weight temporarily but if you haven’t worked at lowering your set point your body will resist back. It will slow your metabolism. The body will increase the hunger hormones called “ghrelin” and a lower amount of the appetite hormones which will make you feel satisfied and full. Over time body will fight back to regain the lost weight.
“Ghrelin” is made in the stomach and it stimulate hunger by increasing the activity of the hunger causing nerve cells. The production of ghrelin rises as the stomach empties. It decreases as soon as the stomach is filled,
If a person is obese, then the weight set point changes in comparison to their body fat. Even if they may be overweight, their body behaves like they are starving. Your setpoint is not fixed, it can slide up or down by environmental factors like your diet, processed foods, saturated fats, etc. Obesity is considered a disease of higher set point.
While overweight individuals frequently feel like they might lack the discipline to lose weight and keep it off, science suggests that obesity is a condition in which our control mechanisms are abnormally managed around a higher set point and the body does not function normally.
Learn more about how processed foods, diet, environment, and other habits can affect our weight set point and drive to obesity. Targeting these variables can help you get to the root cause of obesity so that you can develop a long-term, individualized weight loss strategy.
- Understand how ultra-processed foods override our reward system and increase weight set point
- Understand the benefits of eating whole foods – increase whole foods in your diet
In Summary
The key lesson is that while we concentrate too much on how our food and exercise behavior controls how our body works, the fact is that the body functions control our eating behavior. Although we see recovering weight and returning to being overweight as a failure, our body may be battling what it perceives as the danger of starvation due to a higher setpoint.
Find out more about how our weight set point can be influenced by processed foods and diet. Learn more about how stress, the environment, a sedentary lifestyle, and inadequate sleep weaken our appetite control system and drive us to obesity. Targeting these variables will help you get to the root cause of obesity and manage your weight long term.
Reference:
We over-consume calories due to processed grains and added sugars and fats. We eat until our stomach’s stretch receptors reach a certain volume of food rather than a set number of calories. As we know processed foods do not have much fiber and concentrated in calories. We tend to eat more calories before our stomach senses we are full.
In addition, our stomach and digestive tracks sense a certain nutrient threshold and we stop eating on the basis of the quality as well as the quantify of food. Since the nutrients of natural foods are missing from processed foods, lower nutrient density is another reason why we pack more calories. Over time these causes change in our metabolism and hormones that increase our set point.
The over-stimulation of the reward center in our brain is another way processed foods can increase our weight set point. Today, refined foods are made to offer a great deal of satisfaction and reward well beyond that found in natural food.