If you’ve hit a weight-loss plateau you may be wondering, what gives? There’s plenty of reasons weight loss might stall out, but is your metabolism slowing down one of them?
Metabolism gets a lot of attention around weight loss. It also gets a lot of unnecessary credit and blame. Your metabolism is important when it comes to weight, but it’s not the only factor at play. Here, we explain the biological changes that happen to your metabolism and your body during weight loss and what you can do about them.
What Is Metabolism?
Metabolism refers to the necessary chemical processes that happen in your body in order to maintain life.
Your metabolism includes these functions that burn calories:
What’s the Difference between a Fast Metabolism and a Slow Metabolism?
Afast metabolismis one that burns a lot of calories to support its metabolic functions. Your friends who can eat whatever they want without gaining weight likely have fast metabolisms. In contrast, aslow metabolismdoesn’t burn through as many calories to support the same metabolic functions.
You can blame genetics for this. “Many factors have an impact on metabolism including age, sex, genetics, body composition and weight,” says Allison Knott, M.S., R.D.N., a registered dietitian based in Brooklyn, New York. While genetics largely determine how many calories you burn doing various activities, you do have some control over your metabolic rate.
Can Losing Weight Slow Your Metabolism?
Yes, it can. If you eat fewer calories than you burn off through daily activities and exercise, you will lose weight. The hard part is maintaining that weight loss. More often than not, someone loses weight, keeps it off for a while and then gains it back. There are several factors at play during this process, and metabolism is just one of them.
“In general, losing weight leads to a lower resting metabolic rate and fewer calories burned, including during activity,” says Sarah Gold Anzlovar, M.S., R.D.N., L.D.N., founder ofSarah Gold Nutrition. “Smaller bodies require less energy to function than a larger body-just like a small apartment requires less energy to heat than a larger house.”
You don’t need as many calories to function at 150 pounds as you did at 200 pounds.Your BMR falls, or slows, with weight loss.
To add to the frustration, your brain also sends signals to your body that increase hunger and reduce the number of calories you burn. Evolutionarily, this was a protective mechanism to keep you from starving. Today it is a major cause of weight regain.
“If you go at dieting very vigorously your metabolism falls, so it means you lose less weight than the calories you cut,” says Susan B. Roberts, Ph.D., senior scientist at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center at Tufts and founder of the onlineiDiet weight-loss program. “Slower dieting has a smaller effect. Once you have lost weight and stabilized, if you have been going at a moderate rate of one to two pounds per week, there does not seem to be a long-term impact. Your metabolism is lower because you are now a smaller person, but not disproportionately low.”
Featured Recipe:Mexican Cabbage Soup
Other Reasons Your Metabolism Can Slow Down
Weight loss isn’t the only culprit for a slower metabolism. If you eat too few calories or go too long between meals (more than three or four hours), your metabolism will slow down. This is known as “starvation mode” and is due to the same protective mechanism that happens when you lose weight. Your body slows down the rate at which it’s burning calories in order to conserve energy, because it doesn’t know when you are going to feed it again. This is a double whammy if you are severely restricting calories to lose weight.
The ratio of fat to muscle in the body also affects metabolic rate. Weight, or body composition, is made up of fat, muscle, bone and water. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat. In other words, it burns more calories. When you lose weight, you lose both fat and muscle, unless you are doing something to preserve the muscle mass. Losing calorie-burning lean muscle mass slows your metabolism.
Can Your Metabolism Fall Below a “Normal” Level Because of Weight Loss?
There is no “normal” metabolism. What is normal for you is based on your genetics, age, sex, weight and activity level. But what you consider normal for yourself can change over time due to age, weight loss or muscle loss.
“Some newer research suggests that significant weight loss can lead to a lower metabolic rate than ‘normal’ for that weight and one that is consistently lower even after the weight is regained,” Anzlovar says. “This means that if you started at 200 pounds and now weigh 150 pounds, you will burn fewer calories at rest and during exercise than someone who always weighed 150 pounds. What’s even more frustrating for those that want to lose weight is that research has also shown that if the person who lost the 50 pounds regains that weight, his or her metabolism will be lower at 200 pounds than it was before he or she lost the weight.” It is unclear if this always happens or why it happens, she added.
Can You Boost Your Metabolism?
You might feel doomed to the metabolism you have, but you can do some things to keep your metabolism revved and prevent it from slowing down.
Read More:Trying to Lose Weight? Here’s Why Strength Training Is as Important as Cardio
The Bottom Line
Watch: How to Make Metabolism-Boosting Cabbage Soup
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