Weight Loss (Controlling Body Set Weight) | Jason Fung

today i'm going to talk about the concept of a body set weight and how controlling it can help you lose weight it's coming right up [Music] the body set weight acts like a sort of thermostat for body fat percentage let's think about the concept of how a thermostat works what you do is you set the thermostat for room temperature for example and if it's too cold outside the room gets cold and the thermostat will activate the heater to bring the temperature up to the proper setting if it's too hot then it's going to turn on the air conditioning and bring the temperature down in either case what you do is you try to keep this comfort level and this applies also in physiology it's the concept of homeostasis that is when things get too hot on your body you're gonna cool it down and you do that to sweat when it gets too cold you're gonna shiver and bring the temperature up it turns out that homeostasis also applies to the concept of body fat and the reason is that the body fat percentage is a hugely important factor in survival for wild animals if you think about it an animal that has too little body fat compared to a normal animal is not going to survive because body fat is a store of energy or calories so if it doesn't have enough body fat there's only a limited time that it can survive before it dies of starvation and if it has too much body fat well it's going to be slower so it's going to find it harder to get food and at the same time it's going to be more likely to get eaten so therefore in the wild the body fat percentage is a very tightly controlled measure and this applies to humans as well if you look at the studies over the last 50 years we've well known that the body fat is not controlled just by the the calories you take in and versus the calories you take out there's a body fat thermostat which is sometimes also called the body set weight this is a study done in the 90s so almost 30 years ago which clearly demonstrates this what they did is they took a group of people experimentally gave them a shake and fed them so much that they gained 10 percent in body weight then they looked at how much energy that these people were using in a day when they gained weight their bodies increased their caloric expenditure by almost 500 calories a day which means that they were trying to burn off all of the excess calories that they were taking in so as we were trying experimentally to fatten these people up their bodies were actually trying to push them back towards normal which is homeostasis that's just like the thermostat as we took those people and returned them back to their normal body weight their energy expenditure also went back to normal and as we went and made them lose ten percent of body weight their bodies use less energy by three to four hundred calories per day less this is the situation that we find ourselves in most of the time when we're trying to lose weight our bodies therefore stop using so much energy so if you're burning fewer calories at the same time you're eating fewer calories your weight loss is going to slow down or completely stop so we see that there is clearly evidence of this body set weight and what's important therefore is not the calories in calories out but how are we going to control this body fat thermostat our bodies are almost entirely controlled by hormones and our body fat thermostat is no different it's also controlled by hormones if we turn up certain hormones then our body fat percentage will also go up and if we turn it down it will go down we see this experimentally all the time in this dccct trial they treated type 1 diabetics with either a lower dose of insulin or a relatively higher dose of insulin to control their blood glucose when they took more of the insulin their sugars were better controlled but what happened to body weight well over the ensuing nine years we see that those taking a very high dose of insulin had almost 30 percent incidence of significant weight gain compared to those taking less insulin so clearly those people as we dialed up their insulin gained more weight and it wasn't that trial other trials of insulin have shown the same thing newer forms of insulin have shown that higher doses tend to cause weight gain and drugs such as the sulfonylurea drugs which stimulate us to make more insulin are clearly associated with weight gain when you take a disease such as type 1 diabetes which is untreated we see very low levels of insulin and in fact their body weight keeps going down and down and down no matter what they eat this is an example of untreated type 1 diabetes and on the right as they get treated their weight comes back to normal so it's very clear as you turn up the insulin body weight goes up as you turn down the insulin it goes down let's go back to our example of the thermostat if we have a thermostat which is set at room temperature and now we want to raise the temperature we might do something like bring in a little heater to bring more heat in because we might say well the room temperature is simply heat in minus heat out as we bring in more heat with a heater well the room temperature should go up but it doesn't because the thermostat as it's fixed then turns on the air conditioning to counteract that the body acts in the same way if we say that body fat equals calories in minus calories out we might think oh hey all we have to do is eat fewer calories but if the body fat percentage is fixed at that body set weight then you will not lose weight because your body will simply burn fewer calories and that's what happens in all the experiments we've done for the last hundred years there's two possible ways we can look at it we can say that positive caloric balance causes obesity just like that little heater can raise the temperature in the room but if that's the case then all we have to do is find out why we're eating too many calories and people often say hey that's just the willpower since the low will power is the root cause the solution is to just eat less and that's been what most people have tried for the last 50 years which has been spectacularly unsuccessful but if we look at this from a different standpoint let's say that obesity is an increased body set weight as that body fat thermostat is set at too high level it's going to naturally put ourselves into a positive caloric balance as we try to get up to that body fat percentage but then we can ask the question why is our body set weight too high and we can say well it's the hormones particularly the insulin if insulin is therefore too high then all we have to do is figure out how we're going to lower that insulin and there's two strategies to do that you can watch what you eat some foods are more fattening than others because some foods stimulate more insulin than others therefore we should focus on those foods that don't stimulate it so much eating unprocessed foods lower carbohydrates lots of fiber and the other way is managing how often you eat because every time you eat insulin goes up if you eat 10 times a day your insulin is going to go up higher than if you eat once a day so don't eat all the time and it turns out when people finally start to understand that this is what causes body fat to go up over the long term then you can implement strategies that are more successful than simply counting your calories watching your diet that is what you eat and also how often you eat and that's how to be successful at losing weight thanks for watching everybody i hope you learned something if you did why don't you share with a friend you might help them too and if you could do me a favor and hit that like button uh just underneath there so that other people can find this video i'd really appreciate that thanks so much

Channel: Jason Fung

Views: 500,714

Keywords: lose weight, lose weight fast, weight loss, jason fung, dr jason fung, how to lose weight, body set weight, bsw, set weight, Fat thermostat, body set weight fasting, body set weight jason fung, body set weight theory, set weight point

Id: RL8x7FTSo-Y

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021