How Can Your Brain Sabotage Your Weight Loss Journey

Introduction

Our typical idea of a diet, which is to restrict calories or food groups, carefully watch what we eat, and experiment with trending guidelines leaves us in a difficult cycle. Strangely, weight loss can become harder for us on a diet. This happens for a few reasons. One of them is definitely hitting a plateau after making early progress. Another is the tiring consideration of what we should eat and what we should avoid as we go through our day. The third is our desire to eat more or revert to older patterns as we come closer to our goal. This feeling of reverting to our mean or average can come from our brain conspiring with our bodies. Adding to the points above are the hormones that fluctuate during our weight loss journey.

Leptin and its role in our weight loss:

Leptin is a key culprit in this process. Simply put, Leptin is a hunger hormone that helps your brain measure how much body fat you have. It is released in proportion to body fat and typically decreases your hunger. However, when you lose weight through reducing body fat, your Leptin count reduces. Once this body fat falls below a level our brain considers suitable for us, it sends us signals to eat more.

How our brain impacts our weight loss journey:

The Habenula, a part of the brain, is the kill switch or rejection center of motivation. It acts as an anti-reward pathway. Have you ever noticed how after following a strict diet for 8 days, you just give in on the 9th day and eat your favorite dessert from the fridge? This is because your brain perceives dieting or consuming fewer calories as suppression. When Habenula is suppressed, it releases Ghrelin and Leptin, both of which can increase hunger pangs and control mood, and other body functions. Hence, the metabolic set point theory comes into the picture. This theory explains that, while you are trying to lose weight, by consuming fewer calories, your body responds by increasing your appetite and slowing down your metabolism.

Our body weight is understood nascent by researchers and scientists to be a result of complex and multi-dimensional signals. These internal factors include our ancestry or DNA, our hormones, as well as our psychology. External factors that affect weight can be made up of various contextual and environmental cues. However, over a period of time, the set point theory came into the picture. The set point theory claims our weight can be adjusted over time based on sustained food choice and biology, with medical intervention

Why don’t fad diets work?

Dieting, typically done through a restriction of food consumption, can be a cyclical process of weight gain and loss. Diets can sometimes be ill-suited to you or be increasingly difficult to adapt to, whether for nutritional reasons or due to our brain’s many aspects that regulate our behavior. Restricting one’s food intake often causes social isolation as well – as one starts to avoid social gatherings which inevitably involve food. When an ill-suited or restrictive diet is followed for longer than your body recommends it, there is every chance it can cause you indirect harm. This can happen through weight gain, difficulty in controlling and regulating behavior, or even through internal hormone levels regulated by your habenula.  

An acceptance of self-control improvement and a long-term perspective to reducing our fat and weight levels is a good way to bring your brain to accompany you along this journey. The journey can be made easier by understanding your metabolic set-point and finding health coaches who can help you understand your metabolism and create healthy lifestyle changes for you. A neurological dissociation between reward centers and food is a good starting point. It’s important to diet intelligently, that is, to not be too restrictive or let go of all the things one enjoys. A diet should be sustainable and manageable instead of leading one to a state of emotional or nutritional deprivation. At Elevate Now, our health coaches ensure that the diet plans are prescribed basis personal preferences. This makes them easy to follow and sustainable. 

Sources

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7. Changes in brain activity after weight loss – PMC
8. Lose 5 times more weight by training your mind
9. Functional imagery training versus motivational interviewing for weight loss: a randomised controlled trial of brief individual interventions for overweight and obesity | International Journal of Obesity (nature.com)
10. The habenula: from stress evasion to value-based decision-making | Nature Reviews Neuroscience