How to lose weight and keep it off?

(Or why a pesky substance called glycogen makes you think that you can’t lose those excess pounds)

Eat fewer calories than you burn and you are guaranteed to lose weight.  Simple.  End of advice.

Not really though, is it?

How often have you found that you have done really well – maybe for a few days – only to find that the couple of pounds you lost re-appear in a flash?

You get pissed off (and maybe eat a chocolate or ten?) and it takes you another while to gather your resolve.  But you get your head back in the game and re-stock on lettuce and fat free yogurt, ready to face “the diet” again.  You do really well – maybe for a few days and lose another pound or two – only to find that the weight re-appears in a flash when you stop “being good”.

You get pissed off (and maybe eat a chocolate or twenty?) and it takes you a good while to gather your resolve.  But eventually you get your head back in the game and re-stock on lettuce, celery sticks and fat free yogurt, ready to face “the diet” again.  You do really well – maybe for a few days and lose another pound or two – only to find that the weight re-appears in a flash after “the diet” lapses.

I could go on but I think you may have spotted the pattern.

So what’s the problem?:

• Every time you “give up”, you feel like a failure.  Negative thoughts are self-defeating and make tackling any issue much more difficult.

• Every time you turn to food as a way of dealing with feelings of failure, anger, depression or other negative emotion, you reinforce those negative feelings and further damage your relationship with food.

• Every time you extend your comfort/anger/depressed/etc. eating you are contributing to the extra weight you would like to lose.

• You become trapped in what is truly a vicious circle of “dieting” with little or no hope of success.

If you recognise this pattern as familiar to your story, you are one of many and my heart goes out to you – it is awful if you want to be anywhere but in your own body.  There can be many reasons for that but if you feel that a desire to lose weight and constant unsuccessful attempts are leaving you unhappy inside yourself, there is hope.  Honestly.

I can guarantee that someone, somewhere, sometime has told you that when you lose weight, “that first half stone is all water” or something very similar.  There are many diet myths but this one is different from most in that it does actually contain a grain of truth.  Of course, there is more to it than water.  The real substance you lose in that first flush of calorie cutting is much more complex.  It was forty years before someone told me about it – glycogen.

If you have a degree in bio-chemistry, a year to spare or a love of hieroglyphics I would urge you to check Wikipedia or some such other reference source to find out all about glycogen.  If you are short on degrees, time or geeky hobbies I would urge you to read on for the straightforward explanation.

If you think about your body in relation to domestic appliances, your fat stores are your deep-freeze and glycogen is your refrigerator.  When your body needs energy, it wants it quickly and easily so it goes to the fridge.  If there is nothing in the fridge, it has to start using up what is stored in the freezer.  But, like a lazy teenager, your body will only go that extra step when it has to – it will only burn fat if there is no glycogen available.

So what does that have to do with water and why does it make glycogen so pesky?  Well, glycogen likes water – and lots of it.  It holds on to four times its weight in water.  So for every pound of glycogen, you have four pounds of water.

When you start to lose weight, the first substance the body lets go of is glycogen and so with it goes all that heavy water.  But unless you get to the fat burning stage called ketosis – which generally takes about three or four days – your weight loss is not permanent.

Once you return to your normal eating habits, the glycogen store will be replenished and those extra water pounds will return too.  Hence, all those stop/start diets do nothing except make you feel deprived and discourage you from taking real action to lose weight.  So ditch them!

There’s something else about glycogen that’s good to know if you want to be clever about your diet.  Glycogen is fan of carbohydrates – a big fan.  It is harder to get yourself into ketosis if you eat a carb-rich diet and if you come out of ketosis (planned or otherwise) with lots of carbs, especially if teamed with caffeine, it speeds up your re-glycogenisation.  (Did you spot the made up word?)

Since information is power, it’s good to know what is going on in your body when you want change.  So every time you add to your diet knowledge, you are empowered to achieve what you want to achieve.  And if you want to achieve weight loss, what can you do?

Eat fewer calories than you burn for a sustained period of time and you are guaranteed to lose weight but be smart about how you do it.  Simple.  End of advice.