Your Lipostat

Written by Kyle Ligon - MovementLink.FIT Head Coach

For years I was baffled by two things:

Working with hundreds of fat loss clients, sometimes we count calories and macro nutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) for day just to get an idea of their diet. Strangely, many of them were eating well under 1,000 calories, were not hungry, were losing body fat, had high energy levels, and were feeling great. Not understanding the concept of our Lipostat which I’ll describe in detail later, I urged them to eat more…but they just weren’t hungry.
My own journey baffled me too - I have weighed the same for the last 10 years. I do not count calories or macros. I do not weigh or measure any of my food. And although I own and coach at a gym, contrary to what some people assume, I do not workout more than most of our members. I take 4-5 of our workout classes most weeks and am reasonably active on most of the other days. This is to say that I am not burning an insane amount of calories by working out all the time. But, even if I did workout all the time, with a simple calories in vs calories out model, even if calories out was elevated, without counting calories in, how is it possible that my body weight does not fluctuate?

I now understand that the methods my clients and I adopted controlled our Body Fat Set Points and allowed our Lipostats to work towards and maintain a lean level of body fat. Let’s dive in!

The general consensus is that to lose body fat, you must burn more calories than you consume. What if though, as you restrict calories in, your brain defends a higher amount of body fat? To do this, what if your brain made you insatiably hungry and crave high-calorie foods? What if your body became more efficient at absorbing nutrients from the food you’re eating, meaning that more of the food you consume gets absorbed? What if your brain decreased your energy levels, so you were less motivated to move and therefore burned less calories, so more could be stored in body fat? If you try and lose weight like most people do, this is exactly what happens! But, don’t worry! In this article, we’ll explore how to create the exact opposite of this scenario and how to turn your body from a fat storing machine into a fat burning machine.

Let’s start with our Body Fat Set Point. Our body will defend a level of body fat that it thinks, based on millions of years of evolution, is ideal for our survival. Based on this set point and depending on what we eat, how much we eat, how well we’re sleeping, how much we’re exercising, etc., our body releases hormones that can motivate us into activity or inactivity, feeling hungry or full, and into subconscious processes like how our nutrients are used and stored, raising internal body temperature, and fidgeting. In short, once our brain decides on a level of body fat it wants, it will fight to achieve that level.

An Incredible Study

There was an incredible metabolic ward study (1) that had two very obese individuals and two lean individuals. The only food available to participants was a non-palatable mush, with all the nutrients they needed, that they would drink out of a tube. Participants could eat as much or as little as they wanted throughout the day. Left to their own desires, the lean participants ended up eating around the same as their typical, daily caloric intake from their regular lives. On the other hand, one obese participant astonishingly averaged on 275 calories a day and the other only 144 calories a day! Yes, you read those calorie numbers correctly, they were that low. Even more intriguing is that none of the participants reported being hungry! After the study, one individual continued with bland food, averaging 275 calories a day for 70 days and then continued at home eating 400 calories a day for 185 days, losing 200lbs! I want to reiterate that this participant never complained about hunger. What?!?! So, what’s going on here? Unlike the example I gave at the beginning where someone’s body was defending a higher body fat set point, the circumstances of this study caused the participants’ brains to defend a lean body fat set point influencing the lean people to stay lean while motivating the obese individuals to drop body fat.

To understand the specifics from the study above, we need to understand the Lipostat. Like a thermostat in our home that controls temperature, certain brain regions combine to act like a thermostat for body fat, a Lipostat. As the Lipostat registers too little body fat, processes are put in place to add more fat to our body. As the Lipostat registers too much body fat, processes are put in place to reduce body fat. The Lipostat runs on this general equation (don’t worry, I don’t expect you to do math with this equation or track anything, I just want to lay out how generally how this works):

(Body Fat) + (Energy Absorbed) - (Energy Expended) = Body Fat Set Point.

Body Fat - The amount of adipose tissue (body fat) we have on your body. There’s a hormone called Leptin produced in fat cells and released into the blood at levels that correlate with the total amount of fat stored in the cell. Leptin is a hormone that makes us feel full and is also used by your brain to know how much body fat we have.

Energy Absorbed - Not everything we consume gets absorbed out of your gut and intestines and not everything that enters your bloodstream gets used, or used the same way, which is one of many reasons why measuring things like Calories consumed has too big of an error to actually figure out calories in vs calories out. I highly dislike terms like Calories In because different types of macro and micronutrients are absorbed differently depending on the state your body is in and what else is consumed with it. Just that sentence can be the topic of a book, so I’ll leave it at Energy Absorbed here means the aspects of things we consume that make it into our body for use or storage.

Energy Expended - The energy we burn moving and doing activities, but also just standard brain energy and energy required for normal bodily processes. Included in here is the energy used to break down and convert what we consume into usable nutrients and molecules. For this equation, energy expended is any energy used in the processes that make us run.

Body Fat Set Point - Your brain has defined a Body Fat Set Point or a level of body fat for which it has determined is ideal for survival based on your circumstances. This is not set in stone and later we’ll discuss how to control it. For now, let’s look at how significantly it impacts us.

Let’s look at two scenarios for someone who is currently overweight. Let’s assume this person eats the same very large meal in each of the scenarios: 1) Very High Body Fat Set Point and 2) Low or Lean Set Point.

If someone has a very high set point, then even with high body fat and a large amount of food consumed, their Lipostat will register their (High Body Fat) + (Energy Absorbed) - (Energy Expended) as less than their Body Fat Set Point. To even this issue out, their brain will try and store more body fat by increasing energy absorbed and decreasing energy expended.
- Increasing energy absorbed - This person will experience cravings and feeling hungry, but their body can actually get more efficient at absorbing more nutrients from the food they eat too. So more of the food they consume gets into fat cells. This is a highly valuable tool if we have a limited food supply, but unfortunate when our brain is just misreading the situation.
- Decreasing energy expended - This person will feel a decrease in motivation for activity, so more energy can be stored in fat than used.
If someone has a very low or lean set point (which would be ideal), then let’s see what happens after eating that same meal. Their Lipostat would register their (High Body Fat) + (Energy Absorbed) - (Energy Expended) as greater than their Body Fat Set Point. To even this issue out, their brain will:
- Decreasing energy absorbed - This person will actually absorb less from the food they eat and feel full and satiated, so they won’t be triggered to consume more.
- Increasing energy expended - Their brain will register the excess energy absorbed and work to get rid of it by motivating the person to move by making them feel antsy if they are inactive, causing them to fidget to burn more calories, and by raising their internal body temperature, burning energy to do so. Body temperature alone can burn 500 or more calories per day. That is like an entire meal’s worth that can be burned off as body heat because of a lean set point. Because I practice time restricted eating, it’s rare, but every now and then I’ll be busy and miss dinner. What I’ve noticed is that on those nights I feel very cold. I imagine that most nights my body temperature is higher because my body is simply burning off what it considers to be excess calories I consumed that day and when I miss a meal, there is no excess to burn off, so I am colder.

Let’s revisit the metabolic ward study from above. The lean individuals’ brains registered their (Lean Body Fat) + (Energy Absorbed) - (Energy Expended) relative to their Lean Body Fat Set Point and their brain stressed them to eat an amount of calories that balanced the equitation. Because they were already lean, that amount was equivalent to what they consumed in their day to day lives. The obese people’s brains did the same thing, except the values in their equation looked more like the second scenario from above. With higher body fat, the obese people’s brains didn’t need them to eat very many calories to balance the equation. Body fat is potential energy, so they were able to have plenty of energy by tapping into their body fat stores.

Eating fewer calories can feel like deprivation when your set point is high, but it does not have to! It’s all how your brain interprets your circumstance and if it interprets that you have too much body fat relative to your set point, it will work all of its magic in a way that is directly inline with your goals. Your brain has ways of working you back towards a balance, so the real game is to lower your body fat set point to a lean level and make the amount of body fat your brain is defending equal the amount of body fat you personally want.

What is our Body Fat Set Point Based On?

By default, our body fat set point is lean…unless our behavior or environment has triggered it up higher.

Factors that push your body fat set point up:

Supernormal Stimuli - things in our modern world that create an evolutionary mismatch.
Poor Sleep
Processed Foods.
Sugar, Natural Sugar, Sugar Substitutes, and Artificial Sweeteners
Alcohol

What drives a lean body fat set point? If you follow me, then you guessed it, eating real food, extremely limiting sugar and alcohol, getting quality sleep, getting adequate non-exercise activity, and a holistic functional exercise program - The Specifics of a Healthy Lifestyle. The lifestyle recommendations I make are rooted in health, fitness, and maintaining a lean body fat set point. The closer your lifestyle is to the elements listed, the leaner your set point will be.

By being aware of how you can control your body fat set point and how it impacts your body, we can start to take advantage of how our primitive brain works to align its goals with our own. This is the key to sustainability and to not have to rely on willpower all the time!

References

(1). Studies in normal and obese subjects with a monitored food dispensing device - (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/STUDIES-IN-NORMAL-AND-OBESE-SUBJECTS-WITH-A-FOOD-*-Hashim-Itallie/b37a9d62d0ee49de569778fbafcfb4c27c1f6600)