You can’t beat thermodynamics anymore than anything else in the universe. You. Are. Not. Different. You can’t gain bodymass unless your energy intake exceeds your energy output because you can’t make something out of nothing (muscle or fat).

And you can’t lose bodymass unless your energy intake is less than your energy ouput.

These are rules that every system in the universe has to follow, including the human body. Nature’s rules, not mine to quote the all-knowing Mr. Miyagi. We may not like them, but we have to live by them anyway.

Energy balance is the difference between your energy expenditure (determined by your metabolic rate, activity and some other stuff) and your energy intake (the food you put down your food hole). The difference between those two (whether expenditure exceeds intake or vice versa) determines what happens to bodymass, whether it goes up or down or stays the same. This is even ignoring the body’s tremendous ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

People all want desperately to believe that the fundamental law of weight loss (or weight gain) really isn’t as simple as calories in vs. calories out. I assure you, I wish it weren’t really the case. I really do. I’m mentioning that so you don’t just think I’m peeing on your parade. I wish that through some nifty manipulation of macronutrient percentages you could magically get fat loss or muscle/weight gain without changing the energy balance equation.

People who will claim with their dying breath “I can’t lose weight.” or “I can’t gain weight.” can be shown to do so when their caloric intake and caloric output is strictly controlled (meaning in a metabolic ward where every meal is meticulously weighed and measured) to accomplish one or the other. Create a large enough caloric deficit, or a large enough caloric surplus, and something simply HAS to happen.

The research, however, is very clear: not everybody has it as easy as some folks do. Some people’s bodies are, in fact, demonstrably more resistant to weight loss (or gain) than others. Not that they can’t lose (or gain) weight but it comes off or on more slowly. More accurately, their bodies fight back harder.

Researchers call these folks Diet Resistant and the reasons behind this resistance is just starting to be determined. It probably has to do with how these individuals brains perceive changes in caloric intake which determines how their brains react to those changes. Some people’s bodies simply increase metabolic rate more quickly (or drop it more quickly) in response to increased or decreased calories. You can see similar variations in terms of what’s lost during dieting; given the same diet and exercise program, some people will lose a lot more muscle than another.

So there is no doubt that there are individual differences and efficiencies between people, that probably explains why you can find one person who reports near-magical results with nearly every diet out there: they happened to hit the one that just ‘fit’ their individual metabolism and chemistry. It would be silly to ignore all of that and I do hate being silly.

But that doesn’t change the fundamental rules of thermodynamics which apply to everybody and everything. Given 100 calories, the most you can store is 100 calories. Sure, one person may only store 75, while another stores all 100, but 100 is still the maximum. It’s a physiological impossibility to store more than you actually ate because you can’t make something out of nothing. There’s lots of things like this, that you simply can’t do. You can’t make gold out of lead, you can’t find an honest politician, and you can’t store 500 calories if you only ate 300.

So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is. Either they are that 1 in 100,000 person with a metabolic rate below 1400 at that bodyweight (who has never been found to exist in any study on the topic over a span of about 5+ decades), or they aren’t being accurate in how much food they are eating or how many calories they are burning each day. You can probably guess which one I think it is. And, so we’re clear, I’m not saying that they are deliberately lying, either, I want to make that very clear. They are just as bad as everybody else at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Which is apparently pretty bad.

Which is why you can’t magically gain weight on 1000 calories per day if your maintenance intake is 2000 calories per day. Either your body will mobilize stored fuels, or it will slow down metabolic rate to 1000 to put you back into balance (and no study has ever shown the latter to occur in the absence of rather massive weight loss). Something has to happen. But weight gain on sub-maintenance calories isn’t one of them.

It’s also why you can’t not gain weight on 3000 calories per day if your metabolic rate is only 2000 calories per day. Either you start storing fuel or your body is speeding up metabolic rate to compensate. Something has to happen.
.
Summing up:
You.
Are.
Not.
Different.

 

Based on an article published by Lyle McDonald.