…In essence, if you have excess fat accumulating on your body, then there is a mismatch between your metabolic rate and your appetite. Your metabolic rate may be set for 2,000 calories a day to break even, but your stomach isn’t satisfied until you hit 3,000 calories. For a healthy person with a healthy metabolism, even overeating cannot induce excessive weight gain. In fact, in a force-feeding study performed on prisoners by Ian Prior in which the inmates were forced to eat 10,000 calories per day for several months, some of the subjects gained less than 10 pounds. That’s because our bodies can make natural adjustments to a surplus of food to prevent excessive weight gain. When we up our calories beyond what we desire, appetite goes down while metabolism rises, but only if that energy is making it to our active tissues, and insulin, when elevated beyond the normal range, keeps the energy from arriving. That’s why insulin leads to hunger, and many studies have shown this conclusively by administering insulin and watching what happens. Keep it pumping in and lab animals will continue to eat until their stomachs rupture, and you thought you could fight hunger with willpower.
With that, here is the new calories in to calories out equation:
Calories In = Calories used + Calories stored
Even though this equation still obeys by the physical law of conservation, there is no guarantee that reducing the calories in side will diminish calories stored as fat. Both sides can be in equal balance and fat stores can continue to increase. Even if the calories in side is less than the burned/stored side (which must induce weight loss) you can still store more fat (while losing lean body mass, which is often what happens when overweight people fight hunger with willpower). But don’t dwell too much on calorie balance. As science has shown, if you don’t produce insulin you can eat as many calories as you want, but you will still lose weight. If you take cortisone shots (cortisone, as well as your natural hormone cortisol trigger insulin resistance), with no change in calories in or calories out whatsoever you can suffer from ?rapid weight gain. Clearly there are factors other than calories in control…