It's not about the number on the scales......
Soooooo, this is a tricky article to write!
[But it will only take 8 minutes to read!]
Weight loss is such a triggering issue for so many women, and with good reason. Pressure to conform to particular beauty norms is so entrenched in our society, and whilst body positivity is making headway in welcoming more diverse body types, the emphasis is still very much on appearance. “We are all beautiful in our own ways” is still placing a high emphasis on beauty. I’d prefer a “some of us are fat and ugly and that’s ok” approach, myself.
There’s also some debate around what constitutes a healthy weight, with some believing there’s an agenda against fatter people (I’m going to use the word “fat” rather than an alternative, because I don’t see it as a pejorative word, any more than “tall” is), and it’s certainly possible to be unhealthily thin. Or fat and fit.
Add in the disordered eating that can so easily arise from the pressures placed on us around food, the fact that we are genetically programmed to seek out high energy options and to be “lazy”, society’s puritan judgment around “indulgence” and “will power” and it all easily leads to a pretty unhappy place. The final nail in the coffin is Ultra Processed Foods, stuffed full of emulsifiers and other nasties, that the gut doesn’t even recognise as actual food. This isn’t the best basis for nourishing and nurturing our wonderful bodies and selves.
And as you’ll have already noticed, the Thorny Rose approach isn’t about sculpted abs and minimal body fat. It’s about functional fitness, wellness that allows you to get the most out of your life. A celebration of what our bodies can do. And a protective love for these amazing bodies that seeks to enhance and prolong their awesomeness well into our older years.
With that all said, life is easier when we have a good strength to weight ratio. More muscle, less fat. It makes moving our bodies around and getting them to do the things we want them to do much easier. And it makes us much less likely to develop those nasty illnesses we really don’t want: type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and so on.
So the emphasis here isn’t on banishing the bits we don’t like, it’s about gain. Gaining muscle, gaining gut microbiome diversity, gaining energy, gaining a good metabolic profile, gaining good cardio-vascular health, gaining in confidence. All those gains, and we’re likely to feel lighter, more positive, more capable, more energetic and - well, like us, just better. People will say: “You’re looking well!” when they meet you in the street, rather than: “are you ok?”.
So, here are a list of statements that have mounting evidence behind them. Do any of them surprise you?
Calorie deficits don’t always work
Counting calories is a flawed approach
All calories are NOT created equal.
Metabolism is real. And it drives body composition.
Stress is the enemy when it comes to losing fat.
Belly (and hip and thigh) fat is active fat. It is doing a job and will resist attempts to get rid of it!
You body chooses what to do with energy that’s coming in. But you can influence that choice.
Sleep is a more metabolically hungry process than sedentary wakefulness.
Muscle is metabolically hungry.
The only foods you should really consider cutting out altogether are the fake ones
It’s not sugar per se that’s the problem, it’s sugar spikes and crashes that cause the damage.
Fat, even saturated fat, is not the enemy.
You need more protein than they say.
It’s all about the gut microbiome. Keep that happy and all else is possible.
The “French Paradox” is not a paradox.
Ok, I’d like to look at calories, and then pretty much never mention them again.
The standard advice is based on the calories in vs calories out model. This states:
More calories coming in than being burned means excess calories, means fat storage, means weight gain.
More calories burned than coming in means a calorie deficit, means burning stored fat, means weight loss.
The calorie deficit can be created by less food, or more exercise, or both. The bigger the deficit the bigger the loss. And conversely for weight gain.
Look pretty much anywhere for weight loss advice, and this is what you’ll get. They might caution you about going for too much of a deficit, and putting your body into starvation mode, and they might advise you to choose healthy foods, but the message is still the same, and if it isn’t working, the advice will be to redouble your efforts.
And the fact is, this approach does work, sometimes, and I expect you’ve experienced it working, especially when you were younger. And it works very well indeed for men, especially younger men. And it might still work for you, especially if you go for a gradual approach, where you move a bit more, eat a bit less, and focus particularly on avoiding foods that spike your blood sugar, or at least eat them in a way that is more blood-sugar friendly.
But if it isn’t working - know this:
It isn’t your fault.
And what you need to do to change it isn’t to go for a bigger deficit. It might even be the opposite.
Strange, eh? There are genuinely fitness coaches out there that believe that if a client is running a calorie deficit and not losing weight, they must be lying about what they are eating or how much exercise they are doing.
I myself ran enough of a calorie deficit for a year that following the usual calculations (3,500 calories to a pound of body fat), I should have ended up as negative 5 kilos, or something like that. Clearly I didn’t.
Something to note about this, though- the calorie calculations on food labelling can be very inaccurate, and not only does the food “matrix” affect the availability of its nutrients and energy (whole nuts release less energy than nut butters, for instance, same for smoothies vs whole fruit), but our individual responses to the same food mean calorific values are not to be relied on.
And of course, not all calories are created equal - except, they kind of are.
Did you ever do the burning a peanut experiment at school? That is still largely how calorific values of food are determined. A sample of the food is placed in an insulated, oxygen-filled chamber that is surrounded by water. This chamber is called a bomb calorimeter. The sample is burned completely. The heat from the burning increases the temperature of the water, which is measured and indicates the number of calories in the food. A calorie is defined as a unit of energy equivalent to the heat energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C (now often defined as equal to 4.1868 joules).
And yet, the human body is not a bomb calorimeter.
And nor are we a simple combustion machine, with spare tanks ready to fill or empty depending on the fuel coming in.
Metabolism, or basal metabolic rate is a real thing, and it makes a huge difference.
Any horse owner knows this: the fat cob that only has to smell grass to put on weight, and the thoroughbred that eats their body weight in high energy grains every day and still has ribs that make their owner despair.
Or have you ever seen a fat whippet? Or a skinny labrador?
If you have, they are the exception to the rule, and it took some effort to get there, most likely.
Here are the main factors that affect metabolic rate:
1. Genetics: Some people inherit a faster or slower baseline metabolism from their parents, influencing how efficiently their bodies burn calories at rest. Whippet or lab?
2. Body Composition:The proportion of muscle to fat in the body plays a crucial role. Muscle tissue requires more energy to maintain than fat tissue, so individuals with a higher muscle mass tend to have a higher basal metabolic rate (BMR).
3. Age: Metabolic rate tends to decrease with age. This is partly due to a natural loss of muscle mass and changes in hormonal levels.
4. Gender: Men often have a higher BMR than women, primarily because men typically have a higher percentage of lean muscle mass. Muscle tissue burns more calories at rest than fat tissue.
5. Hormones: This is a big one for us. Reproductive hormones, and imbalances and deficiencies in those, can play havoc with metabolism. Stress hormones, which can be activated by lack of food, lack of sleep, and of course, stressful life events, trigger the body to take lean muscles mass and turn it into active hormone-producing belly fat! Hormones regulating thyroid function can also be an issue.
6. Dietary Habits: Regular meals and certain foods, especially those high in protein, can temporarily increase metabolic rate through the thermic effect of food (TEF). Women often (not always) function better in a fed state. A fasted state can be really helpful for men.
7. Physical Activity: Regular physical activity, especially strength training, can boost metabolic rate by increasing muscle mass. Additionally, the afterburn effect, where the body continues to burn calories after exercise, contributes to overall energy expenditure. The Thorny Rose approach of doing resistance-based exercises really regularly contributes to raising the metabolic rate - the body notices that energy is frequently required by the body and
8. Environmental Factors: Climate can affect metabolic rate; the body may work harder to regulate temperature in extreme cold or hot conditions, leading to variations in energy expenditure. Cold water therapy can stimulate the basal metabolic rate.
9. Medical Conditions: Certain medical conditions, such as insulin resistance or metabolic disorders, can influence metabolism.
10. Pregnancy and Breast Feeding Being responsible for another human can make a body do strange things - either to hold onto fat storage in case it's needed, or to use up stores for the needs of the foetus or baby. Some women find the weight drops off them when they are breast-feeding, others find they are storing plenty of spare energy against potential famine!
There is another way to look at this, too. The body has to make a decision about how to use its resources, and to do that it has to guess what resources will be available to it.
The body will notice a reduction in food intake, or a loss of fat stores, and it needs to work out if this is something to worry about or not. If it is something to worry about, it will go into adaptive thermogenesis. This is a physiological response by the body to maintain energy balance during periods of calorie restriction or excess. When there is a sustained calorie deficit, such as during weight loss efforts, the body may adapt by reducing energy expenditure to conserve resources. In other words, the body resists the calorie deficit by lowering the metabolic rate.
If, however, it notices that there is an increase in physical activity, but there still seems to be good quality nutrition coming in, it will happily splash around some energy resources. It will give you all the energy needed to do the activity, it will allocate resources to repairing muscles that have worked during that activity, it will happily build more muscle and it will even be happy to drop some stored fat, noticing as it does that moving a lighter body is easier. It will send plenty of energy to the brain, which is another metabolically very hungry organ.
The opposite of all of this occurs when your body isn’t confident about food intake. In this case it will want you to build up your fat reserves, and it will shut down as much of your activity as it can, including any non-essential brain activities. Low mood that makes you not want to do very much will suit it just fine, here.
This concern about food intake is triggered by too rapid a weight loss. And it’s a relative rather than an absolute thing. You could have plenty of lovely body stores of energy packed away and it would still be conservative about using them up if it noticed too rapid a loss. Winter is always coming, as far as the body is concerned.
So what should you do?
Move more. Whenever you get a chance, move. If you are capable of high intensity movement, do that, too. If you aren’t, set an intention to get there, if disability isn’t the limiting factor.
Eat more fibre, probably much more fibre.
Avoid all ultra and highly processed foods, and try to keep processed foods to a minimum (remember that even cooking is a form of processing, it’s really processes that you couldn’t do in your kitchen that you are wanting to stay away from).
Eat fermented food every day (start slowly if you aren’t used to this).
Try to eat thirty different plants every week - this includes spices and herbs and even dark chocolate, and coffee, so it isn’t that difficult. But you are also aiming for as much fruit and particularly veg as you can. Frozen and canned are ok.
Go for colour when it comes to fruit and veg - bright colours are associated with high levels of polyphenols which are excellent for our health
Think Mediterranean - a varied diet based on whole foods
Feed the right microbes: The ones that need sugar will prompt you to eat more sugar. The ones that thrive on all things nourishing will prompt you to eat those. Feed these and starve the others and will power won’t be a question.
Timing matters. As does company.
More on this in another article, but essentially, when you eat food, particularly in relation to movement, and how you combine different foodstuffs can make an astonishing difference.
Move more. I know I said that already, but it really is key!