Skip to main content

Weight Gain Caused by Undereating

What Would we Do without Experts?
We've all heard the conventional expert advice to lose weight by eating less and exercising more. It seems to make sense: if you eat fewer calories, your body will have to burn some of its own fat. Or if you burn more calories by exercising, your body will have to burn some of its own fat. Calories in, calories out. Just look at serious athletes or starving people in Africa.

And yet like a lot of things that look good on paper, this doesn't seem to work out in real life. In Why We Get Fat(1), Gary Taubes points out several groups of people who were hardworking, malnourished, and generally overweight. At one time, he adds, obesity was considered a disease of malnutrition.(2)

If you've ever tried and failed to lose weight by eating a little less and exercising a little more, you're not alone. Several years ago, I started Body for Life, a program that involves exercise and eating a lot of protein and carbohydrate. I ate more than I had been eating and lost weight. After a few years, I noticed I'd gained weight, so I cut down on my cheating (I stopped drinking Coke), and I kept gaining weight. I cut out the sixth small meal of the day, and I kept gaining weight. I was diligent about workouts. By the calories-in, calories-out theory, I should have gained weight eating more and lost weight eating less.

The Case of the Underfed Mice
In a recent study(3), researchers fed a group of mice ad libitum (as much as the mice wanted). The fed another group of mice (the calorie-restricted mice) only 95% as much feed as the other group ate. Result of the three-week experiment:

Five percent CR induced significant changes in body composition without altering body weight. Body weight was relatively stable throughout the experiment in both AL and CR mice (P > 0.05). Relative to AL mice, CR mice showed an increased body fat mass (P < 0.01) and decreased lean mass over 3 weeks. CR mice had a 43.6% greater fat mass (4.97 ± 0.40 g vs. 3.46 ± 0.15 g, P < 0.01), and a 6.4% lesser lean mass (14.44 ± 0.17 g vs. 15.43 ± 0.26 g, P < 0.01) than AL mice at the end of the experiment.
Result of the four-week experiment:

Five percent CR induced a significant increase in body fat mass (P < 0.01) and a significant decrease in lean mass (P < 0.01), whereas AL mice remained relatively stable over 4 weeks. Relative to the AL mice, CR mice had a 68.5% greater fat mass (3.37 ± 0.23 g vs. 2.00 ± 0.09 g, P < 0.01), and a 12.3% lower lean mass (14.43 ± 0.24 g vs. 16.45 ± 0.31 g, P < 0.01) at the end of the treatment (Figure 1a)
But wait, maybe the calorie-restricted mice sat around a lot more. Indeed, they did:

TEE (total energy expenditure) (kcal/day, P <>TEE was 5.0% lower (7.97 ± 0.14 kcal/day vs. 8.38 ± 0.46 kcal/day) and REE was 20.7% lower (4.83 ± 0.54 kcal/day vs. 6.09 ± 0.43 kcal/day) in CR mice than AL mice after 3 weeks (Figure 3).

Considering that the CR mice had a 44% greater fat mass than the AL mice after three weeks on their diet, it would have taken a heck of a lot of time on the exercise wheel to burn off that fat.

Why did the CR mice get fat on fewer calories? Their metabolism (the way their bodies use fuel) dialed down. More of the nutrients were sent to fat cells. As a result, they didn't have as much energy to get up and move. Perhaps this is an evolutionary response to food shortages.

Weight Gain, Weight Loss have More than One Cause
What about anorexics and anyone else who restricts calories--why don't they put on weight? They restrict calories a lot, not a little. Weight loss programs like Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig work, at least in the short term, because they set calorie consumption at concentration camp levels.

Is weight gain necessarily caused by undereating? Of course not. It seems there are several causes of weight gain: hormones, medications, and my fave, too many carbs, all play a role. Just as there is more than one way to lose weight (severe calorie restriction, macronutrient balance, micronutrient balance, illness), there is more than one way to gain weight.

For Further Reading:

The basics on a diet that will let you lose weight without restricting calories: the Atkins Diet. This is the diet I've followed for a year. I lost 20 pounds and a number of health problems, improved my lipids, and I'm never hungry.

Tom Naughton's take on the calorie-restricted mouse study:

Dr. William Davis got not only fat but diabetic while hungry and exercising. It looks like those CR mice knew what they were doing by lying around.

A blog post from Weight of the Evidence that includes links to further studies on weight gain and malnutrition:

Mike W's NINO (nutrients in, nutrients out diet):

1. Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, pp. 19-28.
2. Ibid, pp. 29-30.
3. Obesity, "Mild Calorie Restriction Induces Fat Accumulation in Female C57BL/6J Mice" by Xingsheng Li, Mark B. Cope, Maria S. Johnson, Daniel L. Smith Jr and Tim R. Nagy. Published online October 1, 2009.

Comments

Lori Miller said…
CR = calorie restriction/restricted
AL = ad libitum (eating freely)
REE = resting energy expenditure
maddy said…
Hi! Lori Miller

Your doing great job here...Thanks for sharing such info!

Weight Gain

Popular posts from this blog

An Objective Book about Other Childhood Vaccines

Today's decision by the CDC to add COVID shots to the schedule of childhood vaccines has some people concerned about the rest of the vaccines on the schedule. Contrary to fact-checker claims, adding COVID shots to the schedule means children will be required in about a dozen states to get a COVID shot to attend public school. Indiana isn't one of them--our childhood vaccination law doesn't mention the CDC and such a requirement could run afoul of our ban on COVID vaccine passports. But even freewheeling Indiana has some vaccine requirements and this kerfuffle has people wondering how safe those vaccines are.  There's a book called Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy  by Peter C. Gotzsche, DrMedSci and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, about the safety and efficacy of all those vaccines, including COVID and others. Cochrane was founded to "to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving healt

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and