Implications of Constrained Energy Expenditure (Nutrition For Health and Hypertrophy Part 15)

In the previous piece, I talked about what the Constrained Energy Expenditure Model actually is, and in this piece, I want to talk about its implications.

Exercise alone is NOT a good tool for LONG TERM fat loss.

Exercise by itself is not a good tool for fat loss simply because the body adapts to the caloric deficit as the weeks and months go by. You will lose some fat because the adaptation is not complete (your total daily expenditure does rise a little), but the fat loss effects are quite modest.

Unless of course you’re doing so much exercise that the deficit is so large that your body can’t adapt to it. But those are extreme cases.

Don’t get me wrong. You can lose a lot of fat by adding exercise in the SHORT RUN. If you need to lose a few kilos over a 4-6 week cut, adding exercise does get the job done.

But if you have a lot of weight to lose (your cut needs to last months and years), you need to change your diet to create a deficit.

All successful long term diets involve eating less food. Even my Lose Fat Hand Over Fist Diet Plan is a dietary fix, not just adding unlimited exercise.

The body will also adapt to caloric deficits from diet, but you have the option of reducing caloric intake even more.

On the other hand, you cannot increase activity beyond a certain point (time availability, injury risk, joint health, recovery ability, symptoms of overtraining/overreaching, etc.).

I will note that exercise does help with fat loss indirectly. It helps you stick to a clean diet.

Anyone who trains has observed that when they have to take a few weeks off training, their diet becomes shittier as well. This is because exercise supplies your brain with endorphins and other feel good chemicals which keep cravings low (otherwise your brain tries to get them from eating highly palatable foods).

The importance of planned refeeds and planned diet breaks.

This is something many athletes and coaches figured out long before the science caught up.

The goal is to slow down metabolic adaptation as much as possible while dieting and periodically take time out to reverse some of the adaptations.

Refeeds: Refeeds are a scheduled day where you eat at maintenance and keep carbohydrates high (protein and fat go down). This slows down metabolic adaptations and also gives you some respite and prevents harmful diet breakdowns and binges.

A refeed is done typically once every 3-7 days depending on how fat you are – fatter people can wait longer.

Diet breaks: Every 6-8 weeks of dieting (the obese can stretch this to 12 weeks) you take two weeks off dieting and eat at maintenance (by adding carbs).

To quote Lyle McDonald who popularized this long before the science caught up:

While a majority of this is simply due to weighing less (smaller bodies burn fewer calories), there is also an adaptive component, a greater decrease in metabolic rate than would be predicted due to changes in things like leptin, insulin, thyroid hormones, etc.

By moving to roughly maintenance for a couple of weeks, many of those hormones are given time to recover.  Thyroid hormones come back up, as does leptin.  This is a big part of the reason for the recommendation to raise carbs to 100-150 grams per day as a minimum.

Thyroid hormones are distinctly sensitive to carbohydrate intake as are leptin levels (especially in the short-term).  Just raising calories but keeping the diet very low carb doesn’t accomplish everything hormonally I want the full diet break to do.

This is also the rationale behind the duration, thyroid hormones and the effects that they exert aren’t immediate. It may take 7 days of eating at maintenance for thyroid levels to come back to normal, but you need at least another week to get many of their effects to max out.

So in answer to the question “Can I make the break shorter?”, the answer is “No.”  I know that everyone wants to GET LEAN NOW but unless you are a contest dieting bodybuilder or figure chick and there’s no real-time constraint, what’s the hurry?

There are other effects as well. Hormones like testosterone often go down during dieting and female hormones can be whacked out too.  Cortisol generally goes up when you diet and raising calories and carbs helps shut that off for a bit.

There are other advantages to diet breaks as well like giving you a psychological break, teaching you to eat at your new maintenance, allowing your libido to return, etc.. They are very worth it even if they make the diet take slightly longer.

The importance of exercise

The natural reaction people have when they learn about metabolic adaptation is that “exercise is useless”. If the body just adapts to absorb much of the calories burned from exercise, what’s even the point of doing it?

First of all, the real goal of exercise is not “weight loss” but to preserve youthfulness and keep quality of life as high as possible for as long as possible.

But beyond all of that, metabolic adaptation means there are other advantages to exercise as well.

Think about it – if a hunter gatherer and a sedentary guy in an industrial society are burning the same amount of energy, where is all the energy expenditure for the sedentary guy coming from?

Some of it is coming from things like very high immune system activity and stress.

Inflammation

High immune system activity sounds like a good thing at first but it really isn’t. The immune system’s job is to keep you safe from threats.

When it is hyperactive, it starts identifying harmless things as a threat (like your own cells, or dust particles, or pollen) and attacks it.

This means much higher systemic inflammation. Sedentary people have much higher chronic inflammation than active people.

Physical activity takes energy away from the immune system and makes it behave more desirably.

This is why a lot of people find symptoms of arthritis and mild allergies go away as they become more physically active, and why exercise is so good at lowering systemic inflammation.

Stress

You know how people in industrialized society are always stressed out and “have anxiety” despite living such comfortable lives?

Exercise not only teaches your body how to handle stress better, it also reduces your stress response.

Exercise reduces the baseline production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline (these are the hormones responsible for your fight or flight response).

When stress hormones do rise above normal, they also dissipate quicker in people who exercise.

Basically, when physical activity is optimally high, the body has less energy to put in unnecessary stress responses.

The Hormetic Curve of Exercise

Essentially physical activity follows a Laffer curve. Too little and too much are both bad for you and there is a happy medium.

Too little exercise and you have higher chronic inflammation and stress responses and all the other negative things that come from a sedentary lifestyle (muscle weakness, bone density loss, poor heart health, etc.).

Too much exercise and then exercise becomes the reason for chronic inflammation and stress. Along with all the other negative effects of overtraining (joint aches, higher injury risk, cartilage damage, etc).

There is a happy medium, which from my experience looks something like this:

• 10,000-15,000 steps a day (hunter gatherers average about 15k a day)
• 90 minutes of zone 3 cardio a week
• 3-4 strength training sessions per week (or sports or whatever other high intensity activity)

Of course the exact amount depends on your genetics and the intensity of the activity (and of course your age and ability to recover). You need to experiment and figure it out.

Most guys in their 20s are either too lazy and barely train hard, or train too hard and are always a bit fatigued and have achy joints (if you’re reading LMM, you probably are or were in this group).

You need to understand that strength and endurance gains don’t come from the exercise itself, but from recovering from the exercise. The exercise is merely the stimulus to induce your body to adapt to the activity.

I’ve touched on this topic before when I talked about avoiding the very low rep ranges.

Basically, if you’re training too much (which many of you reading this website are because the type of person who reads a website like this wants to maximize his life results), you need to REST MORE.

Take 2-3 days off from the gym every week, sit on your ass and do something else you enjoy. If you really want to do something, go for a walk. But nothing beyond that. 4-5 high intensity days a week are already MORE THAN ENOUGH.

That’s all for this piece.

See you in the next one.

Your man,

Harsh Strongman