What is your set point and can you change it? Set Point is a theory that once your weight stabilises the body will use a series of signals to maintain that weight and most people will bounce around a consistent weight plus or minus a couple of kilo’s. When they start reducing weight below the Set Point by more than 2 kilos then they will feel hungrier when it goes above they will more easily be full.

What interferes with these signals? Hyper palatable foods! Doesn’t sound that bad does it? These foods result in cravings for more food and then a round of unsuccessful yo yo dieting which sees overall weight increasing consistently. How do you go about resetting this mechanism and achieving lasting weight loss?

There are a few key principles to achieving lasting weight loss but the first one is avoiding the foods which sabotage our efforts for at least 6 weeks. What are these foods? Well think about what you would least like to miss out on and I can almost guarantee its on the list;

1. Chocolate
2. Ice Cream
3. French fries
4. Pizza
5. Biscuits
6. Cake
7. Potato chips
8. Buttered popcorn
9. Cheeseburger
10. Breakfast cereal

The combination of fat and carbohydrate is particularly difficult to resist. Add in preservatives and other flavour enhancers and it changes our brain chemistry to crave these foods. Six weeks of avoiding these foods really helps resetting our brain chemistry and provides us with fewer cravings which can sabotage our efforts when we are tired and stressed.

The other key principles for resetting the Set point involve supportive dietary and lifestyle changes. Its critical to ensure the following are included;

1. Adequate protein – this is critical to ensuring that you feel full and that your blood sugar is stable. Diets high in carbohydrates result in significant fluctuations in blood sugar and insulin levels.
2. Diet breaks – this one was a personal favourite! To ensure that the body doesn’t keep returning to homeostasis or your old Set Point we need to ensure it doesn’t get used to a particular routine and sabotage our efforts. One of the key findings from research is that long term caloric restriction reduces your basal metabolic rate. You either slow down or burn fewer calories. Implementing breaks interferes with these compensatory mechanisms and yields longer term weight loss and maintenance of that fat loss.
3. Adequate sleep – whilst it may appear contradictory good quality sleep is actually more critical than exercise. Poor quality sleep reduces willpower, increases appetite and reduces the desire to exercise. In teenagers who were overweight simply increasing sleep resulted in an overall reduction in appetite and decrease in fat mass.
4. Regular physical exercise either medium to high intensity. Regular exercise builds mitochondria in the cells. Mitochondria are like little factories which produce energy and the more we have the higher our baseline energy consumption. Research is highlighting that high intensity training can be the best way to build mitochondria so to give your efforts a boost you need to ensure you have 4 to 5 sessions of exercise a week.
5. The right diet for you – for some people its low carbohydrate and that is certainly popular at the moment however for other people its low fat. Again the evidence is that either can result in successful weight loss in conjunction with regular exercise and stress management.

Are you ready to try and change your Set Point? Book in for a consultation with Christine Pope at Elemental Health and see how we can work together to change it. Appointments can be made on 8084 0081 or online at the website www.elementalhealth.net.au .

More information about obstacles to weight loss can be found in the recent blog What’s your metabolism blocker ?