Set Points, Settling Points, Self-Control, and Why Some People Are Fatter Than Others (Nutrition For Health and Hypertrophy Part 25)

Continued from Part 24 where we talked about sensory specific satiety.

If you’ve read this series so far, you know more about nutrition than most paid nutritionists and other people who charge money for nutrition advice do. Not all of them (this series is only halfway through) but I can guarantee that you know more than at least 60-70% of them.

In this part of the series, I’m going to talk about some models of bodyweight regulation, and discuss why some people are fatter than others.

The Settling Point Model

The Settling Point Model of bodyweight regulation is the idea that your environment defines your bodyweight. When placed in a certain environment, you will have a certain bodyweight, and when the environment is changed, the bodyweight will settle at a different point depending on the changes that have been made.

So far what we’ve covered in the sections on why modern people are fatter than their hunter gatherer counterparts is mostly environment based, so I’ve indirectly covered the settling point model in great detail already:

• Presence of highly palatable foods
• Presence of cheap and easily accessible foods that require minimal effort to consume (no need to start a fire or cook etc.)
• Stress levels
• Sleep and circadian rhythm
• Satiety levels of the foods themselves
• Food variety (sensory specific satiety)

The idea is that if I took you from your present life and put you in a situation where you had lower stress, less access to highly palatable foods, better sleep, etc., your bodyweight would reduce and eventually settle at a lower point than it currently is.

And if I did the opposite and put you in a situation where you had higher stress, more access to tasty calorie dense foods, lower sleep, etc., your bodyweight would increase and eventually settle at a higher point than it currently is.

So imagine if you work a corporate job and are suddenly put on a high stress project where you spend late nights in the office and have a 24/7 cafeteria next to your cubicle serving a variety of tasty foods that your company provides to you for free and have all the rich aromas hit you from time to time, then this model will predict that your weight would increase to a higher point and settle there.

Likewise if I took you camping for a year and gave you enough money that you had zero stress and we only ate foods we hunted, grew, and cooked ourselves, then this model will predict that your weight would decrease to a lower point and settle there.

The Set Point Model

The Set Point Model of bodyweight regulation is more along the lines of what’s happening inside your brain and body itself than with the environment at large.

The idea is similar to that of a thermostat, where you have a set temperature. When the temperature falls below the set temperature, the thermostat turns on a heating mechanism to bring it back to the desired level, and when the temperature rises above the set temperature, the thermostat turns on a cooling mechanism to get it back to the desired set level.

The body does something similar too, where if you lose some weight, the body downregulates the hormones that signal satiety (leptin) and upregulates the hormones that signal hunger (ghrelin).

This makes you hungrier and incentivizes you to put the weight back on, and explains why diets are so hard for people to follow beyond the first few days.

And also why you see so many people do a spectacular diet and then over the coming months gain all the weight back and then some. Their body is trying to get back to the set level.

The reason I say “and then some” in the previous sentence is that the thing is asymmetric, that is to say that the mechanisms that prevent you from losing weight are far stronger than the mechanisms that prevent you from gaining weight (for most people at least).

This is why most people struggle to lose weight but find it very easy to gain weight.

Cutting it short

There are even more models than these two, but these are the most well known ones. I don’t want to get into these models too much because I want to keep this entire series practical and useful, and not turn it into a science textbook.

There is an incredible amount of variation in the sensitivity of different people to their environment, and also their genetic settings.

There are people who are (much) fatter than others even when both are placed in the exact same environment. This means that environment alone is not the only factor.

Some people just have genetics that are more sensitive to the environment (e.g. how much reward they get when they eat, stronger cravings for foods, how sensitive they are to the feeling of fullness, etc.), and have a much more stubborn thermostat that hates losing bodyfat once it’s acquired.

At the same time, we do know that changing the environment affects almost everyone, given that obesity practically does not exist among hunter gatherers.

So the conclusion we can make is that both the environmental models and genetic models have an influence, and that it’s not an either-or scenario.

THAT SAID, IT WOULD BE FAIRLY RETARDED TO SAY THAT WE HAVE NO FREE WILL and that all we do is dependent on our environment and our genetics.

You can control what you put in your mouth (at least to some degree), so it does warrant a quick discussion on discipline and self-control before I give you the practical recommendations for this part of the series.

The Rewards and Self-Control Factors, and Why Some People Are Fatter Than Others Despite Being in The Same Environment

There are two separate individual dependent factors:

• How strong your intrinsic motivation is for food (research shows that some people are willing to do a LOT of work for little pieces of candy or other foods, while others not nearly as much)
• How much you are able to control yourself from eating things you want to eat (you can really want to eat a full packet of chocolate, but if you can control yourself from doing it, you won’t gain weight)

The fat people you see around you (the ones who are fatter than average AND who keep trying to lose weight but fail repeatedly) are people who are usually a deadly combination of:

• A strong intrinsic motivation to eat
• Low self-control to stop themselves from eating
• Environment which promotes weight gain (stress, bad sleep, highly palatable foods, cheap and easy foods, etc.)

If you fix even one of these factors to a reasonable degree, they will start to lose weight towards the average of the population around them in that specific environment.

Practical Recommendations

I’ve already discussed changing your environment in great detail in the previous parts of the series, so the main recommendation I can give you here is to “know thyself”.

You need to understand what kind of a person you actually are. Are you someone who has a strong intrinsic motivation to eat? Are you someone who has low self-control to stop themselves from eating?

If the answer is yes to both, you need to be extra cautious and maintain your environmental hygiene if you do not want to gain weight.

And take the Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program to improve your self-control ability (this will serve you for your whole life in almost every aspect, not just bodyfat control).

But even after you do the program, you always need to be mindful of your natural weaknesses (a long time ago wanting and being able to eat non-stop used to be a big strength by the way) otherwise they WILL creep up on you.

For example I have what you can describe as a “sweet tooth”. That is to say that I love eating sweet foods and if there’s chocolate and sweets in the house, they will always be running in the back of my mind, and sooner or later, I’ll be eating them.

Left to my own devices, I can eat 1500 calories a day in chocolate alone. I find it very hard to stop myself from eating chocolate once I start.

So what I do is I just don’t take the first bite unless I know I am committed to eating the entire packet of chocolate, which I might do on a day I have a particularly tough leg training session or a hard squash session ahead.

If someone gifts me chocolate, I give it to someone else. I try not to have foods I can munch on in my environment and this way I cannot eat them and get fat.

Know thyself, your weaknesses and limitations, and work to fix them, and change the environment to minimize the harm they do to you.

That’s all for this piece.

In the next one in this series, we’ll talk about some fat loss myths which will be the final installment in the bodyweight section of this series (the next section will either be carbohydrates and insulin, or fats).

– Harsh Strongman